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AUBREY BEARDSLEY 


THE CLOWN, THE HARLEQUIN, 
THE PIERROT OF HIS ACE 


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PORTRAIT OF AUBREY BEARDSLEY 


by F. H. Evans 


aby eH, ay 
BEARDSLEY 


THE CLOWN, THE HARLEQUIN, 
THE PIERROT OF HIS AGE 


HALDANE MACFALL 


NEW YORK 
SIMON AND SCHUSTER 
MCMXXVII 


COPYRIGHT, 1927, BY SIMON AND SCHUS 


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Val x 7 


PRINTED IN 


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TO 
EARL E. FISK 


THIS SMALL TRIBUTE 


TO A NOBLE COMPANIONSHIP 


H. M. 


“I have one aim—the grotesque. If I am 
not grotesque I am nothing.” 


“T may claim to have some command of 
line. I try to get as much as possible out 
of a single curve or straight line.” 


[AUBREY BEARDSLEY. ] 


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CONTENTS 


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| ek FOREWORD | 17 


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— I: BIRTH AND FAMILY 93 


Rett: CHILDHOOD AND SCHOOL | 27 
“THE PUERILIA”’ 


: YOUTH IN LONDON AS A CITY CLERK . 35 
ee.” Mid-1888 to Mid-1891—Sixteen to Nineteen 
THE “JUVENILIA” AND THE “SCRAP BOOK” 


: FORMATIVE PERIOD OF DISCIPLESHIP 42 
_ Mid-1891 to Mid-1892—Nineteen to Eventy: 
_ THE “BURNE-JONESESQUES” 


__ V: BEARDSLEY BECOMES AN ARTIST i 58 
tea _Mid-1892 to Mid-1893—Twenty to Twenty-one 

- MEDIAEVALISM AND THE HAIRY-LINE JAPANESQUES 

“I MORTE D’ARTHUR” AND “BON MOTS” 


THE JAPANESQUES | 95 
Mid-1893 to the New Year of 1894—Twenty-one 
“SALOME” 


; THE GREEK VASE PHASE ; 113 
New Year of 1894 to Mid-1895—Twenty-one to Twenty-three 
| “THE YELLOW BOOK” 


me Mtn Poe lan 


IX: 


THE GREAT PERIOD 
“THE SAVOY” AND THE AQUATINTESQUES 2 
Mid-1895 to Yuletide 1896—Twenty-three to Twenty-four 
I. “THE SAVOY” | 


THE GREAT PERIOD 
ESSAYS IN WASH AND LINE 
1897 to the End—Twenty-five 
Il. THE AQUATINTESQUES 


THE END 
1898 


A KEY TO THE DATES OF WORKS BY BEARDSLEY "ae 


ILLUSTRATIONS 


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(tS, 


PORTRAIT OF AUBREY BEARDSLEY by F. H. Evans Frontispiece 
_ SELF-PORTRAIT OF AUBREY BEARDSLEY 25 
i OLY WELL STREET 33 
as ATL MARY 60 
Pl NCIL SKETCH OF A CHILD | 67 
+ a1 
85 
92 
94 
103 
108 
112 
115 
121 
125 
129 
136 
139 


ae FOR AN INVITATION CARD 143 


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HE SCARLET PASTORALE : 149 


i rn a v iis, : mes : ie thle 
pen 2 Oe aa ote x " ee \ > i kee 


ATALANTA 
TITLE PAGE FROM “THE SAVOY” NOS. 1 AND II 
FRONTISPIECE FOR “VENUS AND TANNHAUSER” 
THE MIRROR OF LOVE 

A CATALOGUE COVER 

ON DIEPPE BEACH (THE BATHERS) 

THE ABBE 

THE FRUIT BEARERS 

CHRISTMAS CARD 

THE THREE MUSICIANS 

TAILPIECE TO “THE THREE MUSICIANS” 
COVER DESIGN FROM “THE SAVOY” NO. I 

THE BILLET DOUX 

THE TOILET 

THE RAPE OF THE LOCK 

THE BATTLE OF THE BEAUX AND THE BELLES 
THE BARON’S PRAYER 

THE COIFFING 

COVER DESIGN FOR “THE SAVOY” NO. IV 
COVER DESIGN FOR “THE SAVOY” WO. VII 
FRONTISPIECE TO “PIERROT OF THE MINUTE” 
HEADPIECE: PIERROT WITH THE HOUR-GLASS | 
TAILPIECE TO “PIERROT OF THE MINUTE” 

A REPETITION OF “TRISTAN UND ISOLDE” 


FRONTISPIECE TO ‘“‘THE COMEDY OF THE RHINEGOLD”’ 


a ; 
—WITH THE HOUND 


°S BOOK-PLATE 231 

DY WITH THE MONKEY 235 
DESIGN FOR “THE FORTY THIEVES” 241 

BA IN THE WOOD 245 
DESIGN FOR “VOLPONE” 249 

TAL FOR “VOLPONE” : aan o5s 
THE DEATH OF PIERROT 261 


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TQUE VALE 270 


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FOREWORD 


AxouT the mid-July of 1894, a bust of Keats had been unveiled in 
Hampstead Church—the gift of the American admirers of the dead 
poet, who had been born to a livery-stable keeper at the Swan and 
Hoop on the Pavement at Finsbury a hundred years gone by—and 
_ there had forgathered within the church on the hill for the occasion 
the literary and artistic world of the "Nineties. As the congregation 
came pouring out of the church doors, a slender gaunt young man 
broke away from the throng, and, hurrying across the graveyard, 
stumbled and lurched awkwardly over the green mounds of the sleep- 
ing dead. This stooping, dandified being was evidently intent on tak- 
ing a short-cut out of God’s acre. There was something strangely 
fantastic in the ungainly efforts at a dignified wayfaring over the 
mound-encumbered ground by the loose-limbed lank figure so im- 
maculately dressed in black cut-away coat and silk hat, who carried 
his lemon-yellow kid gloves in his long white hands, his lean wrists 
showing naked beyond his cuffs, his pallid cadaverous face grimly set 
on avoiding falling over the embarrassing mounds that tripped his 
feet. He took off his hat to some lady who called to him, showing his 
“tortoise-shell’”’ coloured hair, smoothed down and plastered over his 
forehead in a “‘quiff” almost to his eyes—then he stumbled on again. 
He stooped and stumbled so much and so awkwardly amongst the 
sleeping dead that I judged him short-sighted; but was mistaken—he 
was fighting for breath. It was Aubrey Beardsley. 

The Yellow Book had come upon the town three months gone by. 

iy 


Beardsley, little more than twenty-one, had leaped into fame in a night. 
He was the talk of the town—was seen everywhere—was at the top- 
most height of a prodigious and feverish vogue. Before a year was out 
he was to be expelled from The Yellow Book! As he had come up, so 
he was to come down—like a rocket. For, there was about to fall out of 
the blue the scandal that wrecked and destroyed Oscar Wilde; and for 
some fantastic, unjust reason, it was to lash at this early-doomed 
young dandy—fling him from The Yellow Book—and dim for him the 
splendour in which he was basking with such undisguised delight. 
Within a twelvemonth his sun was to have spluttered out; and he was 
to drop out of the public eye almost as though he had never been. 

But, though we none of us knew it nor guessed it who were gathered 
there—and the whole literary and artistic world was gathered there— 
this young fellow at twenty-three was to create within a year or so the 
masterpieces of his great period—the drawings for a new venture to 
be called The Savoy—and was soon to begin work on the superb 
designs for The Rape of the Lock, which were to thrust him at a stroke 
into the foremost achievement of his age. Before four years were run 
out, Beardsley was to be several months in his grave. 

As young Beardsley that day stumbled amongst the mounds of the 
dead, so was his life’s journey thenceforth to be—one long struggle 
to crawl out of the graveyard and away from the open grave that 
yawned for him by day and by night. He was to feel himself being 
dragged back to it again and again by unseen hands—was to spend his 
strength in the frantic struggle to escape—he was to get almost out of © 
sight of the green mounds of the dead for a sunny day or two only to 
find himself drawn back by the clammy hand of the Reaper to the edge 
of the open grave again. Death played with the terrified man as a cat 

18 


ae | _—a 


plays with a mouse—with cruel forbearance let him clamber out of 
the grave, out of the graveyard, even out into the sunshine of the high 
road, only maliciously to pluck him back again in a night. And we, 
who are spellbound by the superb creations of his imagination that 
were about to be poured forth throughout two or three years of this 
agony, ought to realise that Beardsley wrought these blithe and lyrical 
things between the terrors of a constant fight for life, for the very 
breath of his body, with the gaunt lord of death. We ought to realise 
that even as Beardsley by light of his candles, created his art, the 
skeleton leered like an evil ghoul out of the shadows of his room. For, 
realising that, one turns with added amazement to the gaiety and 
charm of The Rape of the Lock. Surely the hideous nightmares that 
now and again issued from his plagued brain are far less a subject for 
bewilderment than the gaiety and blithe wit that tripped from his 
facile pen! 

Beardsley knew he was a doomed man even on the threshold of 
manhood, and he strove with feverish intensity to get a lifetime into 
each twelvemonth. He knew that for him there would be few to- 
morrows—he knew that he had but a little while to which to look 
forward, and had best live his life to-day. And he lived it like one 
possessed. 

HALDANE MACcFALL. 


19 


AUBREY BEARDSLEY 


THE CLOWN, THE HARLEQUIN, 
THE PIERROT OF HIS AGE 


1872 — 1898 


BIRTH AND FAMILY 


To a somewhat shadowy figure of a man, said to be “something 
in the city,” of the name of Beardsley—one Vincent Paul Beardsley 
—and to his wife, Ellen Agnes, the daughter of an army surgeon of 
the family of the historic name of Pitt, there was born on the twenty- 
first day of the August of 1872 in their home at the house of the 
army surgeon at Buckingham Road in Brighton their second child, 
a boy, whom they christened Aubrey Vincent Beardsley, little fore- 
seeing that in a short hectic twenty-five years the lad would lie 
a-dying, having made the picturesque name of Beardsley world- 
famous. 

Whether the father were a victim to the hideous taint of consump- 
tion that was to be the cruel dowry transmitted to the gifted boy, does 
not appear in the gossip of the time. Indeed, the father flits illusive, 
stealthy as a phantom in Victorian carpet-slippers, through the chroni- 
cles and gossip of the boy’s childhood, and as ghostlike fades away, 
departing unobtrusive, vaporous, into the shades of oblivion, his work 
of fathering done, leaving behind him little impression unless it be that 
so slight a footprint as he made upon the sands of time sets us wonder- 
ing by what freak or perhaps irony of circumstance he was called to 
the begetting of the fragile little fellow who was to bear his name and 
raise it from out the fellowship of the great unknown so that it should 
stand to all time written across the foremost achievement of the age. 
For, when all’s said, it was a significance—if his only significance— 
to have fathered the wonderful boy who, as he lay dying at twenty-five, 

23 


had imprinted this name of Beardsley on the recording tablets of the — 
genius of his race in the indelible ink of high fulfilment. However, in 
the reflected radiance of his son, he flits a brief moment into the lime- 
light and is gone, whether “something in the city” or whatnot, does 
not now matter—his destiny was in fatherhood. But at least it was 
granted to him by Fortune, so niggardly of gifts to him, that, from 
whatever modest window to which he withdrew himself, he should live 
to see the full splendour of his strange, fantastic son, who, as at the 
touch of a magician’s wand, was to make the pen’s line into very 
music—the Clown and Harlequin and Pierrot of his age. . . . 

As so often happens in the nursery of genius, it was the bright 
personality of the mother that watched over, guided, and with un- 
ceasing vigilance and forethought, moulded the child’s mind and 
character—therefore the man’s—in so far as the moulding of mind 
and character be beyond the knees of the gods—a mother whose affec- 
tion and devotion were passionately returned by the lad and his beau- 
tiful sister, also destined to become well-known in the artistic world 
of London as Mabel Beardsley, the actress. From his mother the boy 
inherited a taste for art; she herself had painted in water colours as a 


girl. 


24 


ot he sent ee Ab) 


Hy 
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pr 
Wy) 


SELF-PORTRAIT OF AUBREY BEARDSLEY 
(Being The “Footnote” from The Savoy) 


: doy 
are, Yet. 
Pater Pe <a 


II 
CHILDHOOD AND SCHOOL 


THE ‘‘PUERILIA’’ 


OF a truth, it was a strange little household in Buckingham Road, 
Brighton. In what to the world appeared an ordinary middle-class 
home, the small boy and girl were brought up by the gently bred 
and cultured mother in an intellectual hot-house that inevitably be- 
came a forcing-house to any intelligent child—and both children were 
uncannily intelligent. The little girl Mabel Beardsley was two or 
three years older than the boy Aubrey, fortunately for the lad as 
things turned out. The atmosphere of the little home was not precisely 
a healthy atmosphere for any child, least of all for a fragile wayward 
spirit. 

It is difficult to imagine the precocious sprite Aubrey poring over 
the exquisitely healthy and happy nursery rhymes of Randolph Calde- 
cott which began to appear about the sixth or seventh year of Aubrey’s 
life—yet in his realm Randolph Caldecott is one of the greatest illus- 
trators that England has brought forth. You may take it as a sure test 
of a sense of artistry and taste in the parents whether their children are 
given the art of Randolph Caldecott in the nursery or the somewhat 
empty artiness of Kate Greenaway. The Beardsleys were given Kate 
Greenaway, and the small Aubrey thus lost invaluable early lessons 
in drawing and in “seeing”’ character in line and form, and in the 
wholesome joy of country sights and sounds. 

A quiet and reserved child, the small Aubrey was early employing 
his pencil, and revealed an almost uncanny flair for music. 


ae 


Sent to a Kindergarten, the child did not take kindly to forced les- 
sons, but showed eager delight in anything to do with music or draw- 
ing or decoration. 

The little fellow was but seven years old when, in 1879, his mother’s 
heart was anguished by the first terror of the threat of that fell disease 
which was to dog his short career and bring him down. He was sent to 
a preparatory school at Hurstpierpoint for a couple of years. Here the 
child seems to have made his chief impression on his little comrades 
and teachers by establishing his personal courage and an extreme re- 
serve—which sounds as if the boy found himself in troubled waters. 
However the ugly symptoms of delicacy now showed marked threat of 
consumption; and a change had to be made. 

At nine years of age, in 1881, the child was taken to Epsom for a 
couple of years, when his family made a move that was to have a pro- 
found influence over his future. 

In the March of 1883, in his eleventh year, the Beardsleys settled 
in London. Aubrey with his sister Mabel, was even at this early age so 
skilled in music that he had made his appearance in public as an in- 
fant prodigy—the two children playing at concerts. Indeed, the boy’s 
knowledge of music was so profound that there was more than whimsy 
in the phrase so often upon his lips in the after-years when, apologis- 
ing for speaking with authority on music, he excused himself on the 
plea that it was the only subject of which he knew anything. His feel- 
ing for sound was to create the supreme quality of his line when, in the 
years to come, he was to give forth line that “‘sings’’ like the notes of a 
violin. But whether the child’s drawings for menus and invitation- 
cards in coloured chalks were due to his study of Kate Greenaway or 

28 


not, the little fellow was certainly fortunate in getting “quite consider- 
able sums” for them; for, of a truth, they must have been fearsome 
things. As we shall see, Aubrey Beardsley’s early work was wretched 
and unpromising stuff. 

A year of the unnatural life the boy was leading in London made it 
absolutely necessary in the August of 1884, at his twelfth birthday, to 
send the two children back to Brighton to live with an old aunt, where 
the small boy and girl were now driven back upon themselves by the 
very loneliness of their living. Aubrey steeped himself in history, 
eagerly reading Freeman and Green. 

_In the November he began to attend the Brighton Grammar School; 
and in the January of 1885 he became a boarder. 

Here fortune favored Aubrey; and he was to know three and a half 
years at the school, very happy years. His house-master, Mr. King, 
greatly liked the youngster, and encouraged him in his tastes by 
letting him have the run of a sitting room and library; so that Aubrey 
Beardsley was happy as the day was long. His “‘quaint personality” 
soon made its mark. In the June of 1885, near his thirteenth birthday, 
he wrote a little poem, “The Valiant,” in the school magazine. The 
delicate boy, as might be expected, found all athletic sports dis- 
tasteful and a strain upon his fragile body, and he was generally to 
be found with a book when the others were at play. His early love for 
Carlyle’s ““French Revolution,” the poets, and the Tudor and Res- 
toration dramatists, was remarkable in a schoolboy. He read 
“Erewhon” and “enjoyed it immensely,”’ though it had been lent to 
him with grave doubts as to whether it were not too deep for him. His 
unflagging industry became a byword. He caricatured the masters; 

29 


acted in school plays—appearing even before large audiences at the 
Pavilion—and was the guiding spirit in the weekly performances at 
the school got up by Mr. King and for which he designed programmes. 
His headmaster, Mr. Marshall, showed a kindly attitude towards the 
lad; but it was Mr. Payne who actively encouraged his artistic lean- 
ings, as Mr. King his theatrical. 

Unfortunately, in the radiance of his after-rise to fame, these 
“‘nuerilia’’ have been eagerly acclaimed by writers on his art as reve- 
lations of his budding genius; but as a painful matter of plain un- 
varnished truth, they were wretched trashy efforts that ought to have 
been allowed to be blotted from his record and his reputation. Prob- 
ably his performances as an actor were as nerve-racking a business as 
the grown-ups are compelled to suffer at school speech-days. Beardsley 
himself showed truer judgment than his fond admirers in that, on 
reaching to years of discretion, he ever desired, and sought every 
means in his power, to obliterate his immature efforts by exchanging 
good work for them and then destroying them. Indeed, the altogether 
incredible fact about all of Beardsley’s early work is that it was such 
unutterable trash. 

Of the influences that were going to the making of Aubrey’s mind 
at school, it is well to note that the youngster bought each volume of 
the “Mermaid” issue of the Elizabethan dramatists as it came out, giv- 
ing amateur performances of the plays with his sister in his holidays. 
By the time he was to leave Brighton Grammar School at sixteen, he 
had a very thorough grip on Elizabethan literature. It is, some of it, 
very strong meat even for sixteen; but Aubrey had been fed on strong 
meat almost from infancy. Early mastering the French tongue, the lad 
was soon steeped in the French novel and classics. From the French he 

30 


worked back to Latin, of which he is said to have been a facile reader 
—but such Latin as he had was probably much of a piece with the 
dog-Latin of a public school classical education. 

Now we know from his school-friend, Mr. Charles Cochran, that 
Aubrey Beardsley drew the designs for the ‘‘Pied Piper” before he 
left the school in mid-1888—though the play was not performed un- 
til Christmastide at the Dome in Brighton on Wednesday December . 
the 19th 1888. Cochran also bears witness to the fact that the pen 
and wash drawing of Holywell Street was made in mid-1888 before 
he left the school. He describes his friend Beardsley with “his red 
hair—worn 4 la Bretonne,” which I take it means ‘“‘bobbed,” as the 
modern girl now calls it. Beardsley is “indifferent” in school-work, 
but writes verse and is very musical. His “‘stage-struck mood” we have 
seen encouraged by his house-master, Mr. King. 

C. B. Cochran and Beardsley went much to ‘“‘matinees” at 
Brighton; and at one of these is played “L’Enfant Prodigue’” without 
words—it was to make an ineffaceable impression on young Beardsley. 

There is no question that L’Enfant Prodigue and the rococo of 
Bright Pavilion coloured the vision and shaped the genius of Beard- 
sley; and he never let them go. He was to flirt with faked medizval- 
ism; he was to flirt awhile with Japan; but he ever came back to 
Pierrot and the bastard rococo of Brighton Pavilion. 

Beardsley was now becoming very particular about his dress, 
though how exactly he fitted the red hair “a la Bretonne”’ to his the- 
ory of severe good taste in dress that should not call attention to the 
wearer, would require more than a little guesswork. 

The Midsummer of 1888 came to Brighton Grammar School as it 
came to the rest of the world, and Aubrey Beardsley’s schooldays were 

31 


numbered. At his old school the lank angular youth had become a 
marked personality. Several of his schoolfellows were immensely 
proud of him. But the uprooting was at hand; and the July of 1888, 
on the eve of his sixteenth birthday, saw the young fellow bidding 
farewell and leaving for London, straightway to become a clerk in an 
architect’s office. 

At Brighton Grammar School, Beardsley left behind him all his 
“puerilia”—or what the writers generally call his “‘juvenilia,” but 
these were not as yet. It is almost incredible that the same hesitant, 
inarticulate, childish hand that drew the feeble puerilities of the “Pied 
Piper” could at the same time have been making the wash drawing 
of Holywell Street. It may be that Mr. Cochran’s memory plays him 
a month or two false—it is difficult to see why Beardsley should 
have made a drawing at a school in Brighton of a street in London 
that he had not yet learnt to frequent—but even granting that the 
Holywell Street was rough-sketched in London and sent by Beard- 
sley to his schoolfellow a month or two later, in the Holywell Street 
(1888) there is a significance. At sixteen, in mid-1888, Beardsley 
leaves his school and his “‘puerilia’”” cease—he enters at once on a 
groping attempt to find a craftsmanship whereby to express his 
ideas and impressions. So far, of promise there has been not a tittle— 
one searches the “puerilia” for the slightest glimmer of a sign—but 
there is none. 

In the Holywell Street there is the sign—and a portent. 

It is Beardsley’s first milestone on his strange, fantastic, tragi-comic 
wayfaring. | } 


32 


+ aman 


HOLYWELL STREET 


III 
YOUTH IN LONDON AS A CITY CLERK 
Mid-1888 to Mid-1891—Sixteen to Nineteen 


THE “‘JUVENILIA’’ AND THE ‘“‘SCRAP BOOK’”’ 


AT sixteen, in the August of 1888, Aubrey Beardsley, a lank tall 
dandified youth, loose-limbed, angular, and greatly stooping, went to 
live with his father and mother in London in their home at 59 Charl- 
wood Street, Pimlico, in order to go into business in the city as clerk 
in the office of an architect at Clerkenwell, awaiting a vacancy in an 
Insurance office. 

The lad came up to London, though intensely self-conscious and 
shy and sensitive to social rebuff, a bright, quick-witted, intelligent 
young fellow, lionised by his school, to find himself a somewhat soli- 
tary figure in the vast chill of this mighty city. In his first little Pimlico 
home in London, he had the affectionate and keenly appreciative, 
sympathetic, and hero-worshipping companionship of his devoted 
mother and sister. In this home Aubrey with his mother and sister 
was in an atmosphere that made the world outside quite unimportant, 
an atmosphere to which the youngster came eagerly at the end of his 
day’s drudgery in the city, and—with the loud bang of the hall- 
door—shut out that city for the rest of the evening. Brother and 
sister were happy in their own life. 

But it is that Holywell Street drawing which unlocks the door. It 
is almost as vital as this home in Pimlico. In those days the dingy old 
ramshackle street better known as Book-Seller’s Row—that made 
an untidy backwater to the Strand between the churches of St. Mary 

35 


le Strand and St. Clement Danes, now swept and garnished as Ald- 
wych—was the haunt of all who loved old books. You trod on the 
toes of Prime Ministers or literary gods or intellectual riff-raff with 
equal absence of mind. But Holywell Street, with all its vicissitudes, 
its fantastic jumble of naughtinesses and unsavoury prosecutions— 
and its devotion to books—was nearing its theatric end. In many 
ways Holywell Street was a symbol of Beardsley. The young fellow 
spent every moment he could snatch from his city office in such fas- 
cinating haunts as these second-hand bookshops. 

We know that, on coming to London, Beardsley wrote a farce, “A 
Brown Study,” which was played at the Royal Pavilion at Brighton; 
and that before he was seventeen he had written the first act of a three- 
act comedy and a monologue called “‘A Race for Wealth.” 

A free afternoon would take him to the British Museum or the 
National Gallery to browse amongst antique art. 

His time for creative work could have been but scant, and his del- 
icate health probably compelled a certain amount of caution on his 
behalf from his anxious sister and mother. But at nine every evening 
he really began to live; and he formed the habit of working at night 
by consequence. We may take it that Beardsley’s first year in London 
was filled with eager pursuit of literature and art rather than with 
any sustained creative effort. And he would make endless sacrifices 


to hear good music, which all cut into his time. Nor had he yet even 


dreamed of pursuing an artistic career. 
The family were fortunate in the friendship of the Reverend Alfred 
Gurney who had known them at Brighton, and had greatly encouraged 

Beardsley’s artistic leanings. 
36 


PO ee 


Beardsley had only been a year in London when he retired from 
the architect’s office and became a clerk in the Guardian Insurance 
Office, about his seventeenth birthday—August 1889. Whether this 
change bettered his prospects, or whatsoever was the motive, it was 
unfortunately to be the beginning of two years of appalling misery 
and suffering, in body and soul, for the youth. His eighteenth and 
nineteenth years were the black years of Aubrey Beardsley—and as 
blank of achievement as they were black. 

From mid-1889 to mid-1891 we have two years of emptiness in 
Beardsley’s career. Scarcely had he taken his seat at his desk in the 
Guardian Insurance Office when, in the Autumn of 1889, he was as- 
sailed by a violent attack of bleeding from the lungs. The lad’s the- 
atres and operas and artistic life had to be wholly abandoned; and 
what strength remained to him he concentrated on keeping his clerkly 
position at the Insurance Office in the city. 

The deadly hemorrhages which pointed to his doom came near to 
breaking down his wonderful spirit. The gloom that fell upon his 
racked body compelled him to cease from drawing, and robbed him 
of the solace of the opera. It was without relief. The detestation of a 
business life which galled his free-roving spirit, but had to be endured 
that he might help to keep the home for his family, came near to sink- 
ing him in the deeps of despair at a moment when his bodily strength 
and energy were broken by the appalling exhaustion of the pitiless 
disease which mercilessly stalked at his side by day and by night. He 
forsook all hope of an artistic life in drawing or literature. How the 
plagued youth endured is perhaps best now not dwelt upon—it was 
enough to have broken the courage of the strongest man. 


37 


Beardsley’s first three years in London, then, were empty unfruitful 
years. From sixteen to nineteen he was but playing with art as a mere 
recreation from his labours in the city as his fellow-clerks played 
games or chased hobbies. What interest he may have had in art, and 
that in but an amateurish fashion, during his first year in London, was 
completely blotted out by these two blank years of exhausting bodily 
suffering that followed, years in which his eyes gazed in terror at 
death. 

His first year had seen him reading much amongst his favourite 
eighteenth century French writers, and such modern books as ap- 
pealed to his morbid inquisition into sex. The contemplation of his 
disease led the young fellow to medical books, and it was now that the 
diagrams led him to that repulsive interest in the unborn embryo— 
especially the human fetus—with which he repeatedly and wilfully 
disfigured his art on occasion. He harped and harped upon it like a 
dirty-minded schoolboy. 

Soon after the young Beardsley had become a clerk in the Guardian 
Insurance Office he found his way to the fascinating mart of Jones 
and Evans’s well-known bookshop in Queen Street, Cheapside, 
whither he early drifted at the luncheon hour, to pore over its treas- 
ures—to Beardsley the supreme treasure. 

It was indeed Beardsley’s lucky star that drew him into that 
Cheapside bookshop, where, at first shyly, he began to be an occa- 
sional visitor, but in a twelvemonth, favoured by circumstance, he be- 
came an almost daily frequenter. 

‘The famous bookshop near the Guildhall in Queen Street, Cheap- 
side, which every city man of literary and artistic taste knows so well 
—indeed the bookshop of Jones and Evans has been waggishly called 

38 


the University of the city clerk, and the jest masks a truth—was but 
a minute’s walk for Beardsley within a twelvemonth of his coming to 
London town; and the youth was fortunate in winning the notice of 
one of the firm who presided over the place, Mr. Frederick Evans. 
Here Beardsley would turn in after his city work was done, as well as 
at the luncheon hour, to discuss the new books; and thereby won 
into the friendship of Frederick Evans who was early interested in 
him. They also had a passionate love of music in common. It was to 
Frederick Evans and his hobby of photography that later we were to 
owe two of the finest and most remarkable portraits of Beardsley at 
the height of his achievement and his vogue. 

Thus it came about that Beardsley made his first literary friendship 
in the great city. He would take a few drawings he made at this time 
and discuss them with Frederick Evans. Soon they were on so friendly 
a footing that Evans would “swap”’ the books for which the youth 
craved in exchange for drawings. This kindly encouragement of 
Beardsley did more for his development at this time than it is well 
possible to calculate. At the Guardian Insurance Office there sat next 
to Beardsley a young clerk called Pargeter with whom Beardsley 
made many visits to picture galleries and the British Museum, and 
both youngsters haunted the bookshop in Cheapside. 

“We know by the Scrap Book, signed by him on the 6th of May 
1890, what in Beardsley’s own estimate was his best work up to that 
time, and the sort of literature and art that interested him. None of 
this work has much promise; it shows no increasing command of the 
pictorial idea—only an increasing sense of selection—that is all. His 
““juvenilia” were as mediocre as his “‘puerilia’’ were wretched; but 
there begins to appear a certain personal vision. 


39 


Se ees Sate Le ey ee! ey See 


From the very beginning Beardsley lived in books—saw life only 
through books—was aloof from his own age and his own world, which 
he did not understand nor care to understand; nay, thought it rather 
vulgar to understand. When he shook off the dust of the city from his 
daily toil, he lived intellectually and emotionally in a bookish at- 
mosphere with Madame Bovary, Beatrice Cenci, Manon Lescaut, Ma- 
demoiselle de Maupin, Phédre, Daudet’s Sappho and La Dame aux 
Cameélias, as his intimates. He sketched them as yet with but an ama- 
teur scribbling. But he dressed for the part of a dandy in his narrow 
home circle, affecting all the airs of superiority of the day—contempt 
for the middle-class—contempt of Mrs. Grundy—elaborately culti- 
vating a flippant wit—a caustic tongue. He had the taint of what Tree 
used to whip with contempt as “refainement”—he affected a voice 
and employed picturesque words in conversation. He pined for the 
day when he might mix with the great ones as he conceived the great 
ones to be; and he sought to acquire their atmosphere as he conceived 
it. Beardsley was always theatrical. He noticed from afar that people 
of quality, though they dressed well, avoided ostentation or eccen- 
tricity—dressed “just so.” He set himself that ideal. He tried to catch 
their manner. The result was that he gave the impression of in- 
tense artificiality. And just as he was starting for the race, this black 
hideous suffering had fallen upon him and made him despair. In 
1890 had appeared Whistler’s Gentle Art of Making Enemies— 
Beardsley steeped himself in the venomous wit and set himself to 
form a style upon it, much as did the other young bloods of artistic 
ambition. 

As suddenly as the blackness of his two blank years of obliteration 
had fallen upon him a year after he came to town, so as he reached 

40 


. 


iar he had treated art as an amateur seeking recreation; he now Ee 
cided to make an effort to become an artist. 
- The sun shone for him. 


IV 
FORMATIVE PERIOD OF DISCIPLESHIP 
Mid-1891 to Mid-1892—Nineteen to Twenty 


THE ““BURNE-JONESESQUES’’ 


On a Sunday, the 12th of J uly 1891, near the eve of his nineteenth 
birthday, Beardsley called on Burne-Jones. 

Beardsley being still a clerk in the city—his week-ends given to 
drudgery at the Insurance Office—he had to seize occasion by the 
forelock—therefore Sunday. 

The gaunt youth went to Burne-Jones with the light of a new life 
in his eyes; he had shaken off the bitter melancholy which had black- 
ened his past two years and had kept his eyes incessantly on the grave; 
and, turning his back on the two years blank of fulfilment or artistic 
endeavour, he entered the gates of Burne-Jones’s house in the long 
North End Road in West Kensington with new hopes built upon the 
promise of renewed health. 

We can guess roughly what was in the portfolio that he took to 
show Burne-Jones—we have seen what he had gathered together in 
the Scrap Book as his best work up to mid-1890, and he had done 
little to add to it by mid-1891. We know the poverty of his artistic 
skill from the wretched pen-and-ink portrait he made of himself at 
this time—a sorry thing which he strained every resource to re- 
cover from Robert Ross who maliciously hid it from him and event- 
ually gave it to the British Museum—an act which, had Beardsley 

42 


~~ a 
a, a oe ee ee st ae. he en ee 


known the betrayal that was to be, would have made him turn in his 
grave. But that was not as yet. We know from a fellow-clerk in the 
city that Beardsley had made an occasional drawing in wash, or toned 
in pencil, like the remarkably promising Moliére, which it is difficult 
to believe as having been made previous to the visit to Burne-Jones, 
were it not that it holds no hint of Burne-Jones’s influence which was 
now to dominate Beardsley’s style for a while. 

Burne-Jones took a great liking to the youth, was charmed with 
his quick intelligence and enthusiasm, tickled by his ironies, and took 
him to his heart. When Beardsley left the hospitable man he left in 
high spirits, and an ardent disciple. Burne-Jonesesques were hence- 
forth to pour forth from his hands for a couple of years. 

Beardsley’s call on Watts was not so happy—the solemnities 
reigned, and the great man shrewdly suspected that Beardsley was 
not concerned with serious fresco—’tis even whispered that he sus- 
pected naughtiness. 

As the young Beardsley had seen the gates of Burne-Jones’s house 
opening to him he had hoped that he was stepping into the great world 
of which he had dreamed in the city. The effect of this visit to Burne- 
Jones was upheaving. Beardsley plunged into the Esthetic conven- 
tions of the medizval academism of Burne-Jones to which his whole 
previous taste and his innate gifts were utterly alien. At once he be- 
came intrigued over pattern and decoration for which he had so far 
shown not a shred of feeling. For the Reverend Alfred Gurney, the 
old Brighton friend of the family, the young fellow designed Christ- 
mas cards which are thin if whole-hearted mimicry of Burne-Jones, as 
indeed was most of the work on which he launched with enthusiasm, 
now that he had Burne-Jones’s confidence in his artistic promise 

43 


EEE) Poss bee Cee ye 


whereon to found his hopes. Not only was he turned aside from his 
18th century loves to an interest in the Arthurian legends which had 
become the keynote of the Atsthetic Movement under Morris and 
Burne-Jones, but his drawings reveal that the kindred atmosphere of 
the great Teutonic sagas, Tristan and Tannhauser and the Gotter- 
dammerung saw him back at his beloved operas and music again. 
Frederick Evans, who was as much a music enthusiast as literary 
and artistic in taste, saw much of the young fellow in his shop in 
Cheapside this year. He was striving hard to master the craftsmanship 
of artistic utterance. 

Another popular tune that caught the young Beardsley’s ears was 
the Japanese vogue set agog by Whistler out of France. Japan con- 
quered London as she had conquered France—if rather a pallid ghost 
of Japan. The London house became an abomination of desolation, 
“faked” with Japanese cheap art and imitation Japanese furniture. 
There is nothing more alien to an English room than Eastern decora- 
tions, no matter how beautiful in themselves. But the vogue-mongers 
sent out the word and it was so. 

It happened that the Japanese craze that was on the town intrigued 
Beardsley sufficiently to make him take considerable note of the use of 
pure line by the Japs—he saw prints in shops and they interested 
him, but he had scant knowledge of Japanese art; the balance, spac- 
ing, and use of line, were a revelation to him, and he tried to make a 
sort of bastard art by replacing the Japanese atmosphere and types 
with English types and atmosphere. There was a delightful disregard 
of perspective and of atmospheric values in relating figures to scenery 
which appealed to the young fellow, and he was soon experimenting 
in the grotesque effects which the Japanese convention allowed to him. 


4A, 


= - - _ 


Said to be of this year of 1891 is an illustrated “Letter to G. F’. 
Scotson-Clark Esq.,”’ his musician friend, “written after visiting 
Whistler’s Peacock Room.” This much-vaunted room probably owes 
most of its notoriety to the fiercely witty quarrel that Whistler waged 
with his patron Leyland, the ship-owner. It is not clear that the form 
and furniture of this pseudo-Japanese room owed anything whatso- 
ever to Whistler; it would seem that his part in its decoration was 
confined to smothering an already existing hideosity in blue paint and 
gold leaf. It was a room in which slender spindles or narrow square 
upright shafts of wood, fixed a few inches from the walls, left the chief 
impression of the Japanesque, suggestive of the exquisite little cages 
the Japs make for grasshoppers and fireflies; and to this extent 
Whistler may have approved the abomination, for we have his disciple 
Menpes’s word for it that Whistler’s law for furniture was that it 
‘should be as simple as possible and be of straight lines.’” Whistler 
and Wilde’s war against the bric-a-brac huddle and hideousness of 
the crowded Victorian drawing-room brought in a barren bare type 
of room to usurp it which touched bottom in a designed emptiness, in 
preciousness, in dreariness, and in discomfort. Whatsoever Whistler’s 
blue and gold-leaf scheme, carried out all over this pretentious room, 
may have done to better its state, at least it must have rid it of the 
brown melancholy of the stamped Spanish leather which Whistler 
found so “stunning to paint upon.” It is probable that this contrap- 
tion of pseudo-Japanese art, to which the rare genius of Whistler was 
degraded, did impress the youthful Beardsley in this his imitative 
stage of development, owing to its wide publicity. The hideous slender 
straight wooden uprights of the furnishments of which the whole 
thing largely consisted, were indeed to be adopted by Beardsley as 

45 


the basis of his drawings of furniture a year or two afterwards, as we 
shall see. But in some atonement, the supurb peacock shutters by 
Whistler also left their influence on the sensitive brain of the younger 
man—those peacocks that were to bring forth a marked advance in 
Beardsley’s decorative handling a couple of years later when he was 
to give his Salome to the world. 

It is not uninteresting to note that, out of this letter, flits for a 
fleeting moment the shadowy figure of the father—as quickly to van- 
ish again. At least the father is still alive; for the young fellow calls 
for his friend’s companionship as his mother and sister are at Wok- 
ing and he and his “‘pater”’ alone in the house. 

Beardsley’s old Brighton Senior House-Master, Mr. King, had be- 
come secretary to the Blackburn Technical Institute, for which he 
edited a little magazine called The Bee; and it was in the November 
of 1891 that Beardsley drew for it as frontispiece his Hamlet in which 
he at once reveals the Burne-Jonesesque discipleship. 

It is well to keep in mind that the winter of 1891 closed down on 
Aubrey Breadsley in a middle-class home in Pimlico, knowing no one 
of note or consequence except Burne-Jones. His hand’s skill was halt: 
ing and his craftsmanship hesitant and but taking root in a feeling 
for line and design; but the advance is so marked that he was clearly 
working hard at self-development. It was as the year ran out, some 
six months after the summer that had brought hope and life to 
Beardsley out of the grave that, at the Christmastide of 1891, Aymer 
Vallance, one of the best-known members of the Morris group, went 
to call on the lonely youngster after disregarding for a year and a half 
the urgings of the Reverend C. G. Thornton, a parson who had known 
the boy when at Brighton school. Vallance found Beardsley one after- 

46 


noon at Charlwood Street, his first Pimlico home, and came away 
wildly enthusiastic over the drawings that Beardsley showed him at 
his demand. It is to Vallance’s credit and judgment that he there and 
then turned the lad’s ambition towards becoming an artist by profes- 
sion—an idea that up to this time Beardsley had not thought possible 
or practicable. 

Now whilst loving this man for it, one rather blinks at Vallance’s 
enthusiasm. On what drawings did his eyes rest, and wherein was he 
overwhelmed with the revelation? Burne-Jones has a little puzzled us 
in the summer; and now Vallance! Well, there were the futile “‘puer- 
ilia’”-—the Pied Piper stuff—which one cannot believe that Beard- 
sley would show. There was the Burne-Jonesesque Hamlet from 
the Bee just published. Perhaps one or two other Burne-Jones- 
esques. He himself can recall nothing better. In fact Beardsley had 
not done anything better than the Hamlet. Then there was the Scrap 
Book! However, it was fortunate for the young Beardsley that he won 
so powerful a friend and such a scrupulous, honourable, and loyal 
friend as Aymer Vallance. 

On St. Valentine’s Day, the 14th of February 1892, before the 
winter was out, Vallance had brought about a meeting of Robert Ross 
and Aubrey Beardsley at a gathering at Vallance’s rooms. Robert 
Ross wrote of that first meeting after Beardsley was dead, and in any 
case his record of it needs careful acceptance; but Ross too was over- 
whelmed with the personality of the youth—Ross was always more 
interested in personality than in artistic achievement, fortunately, for 
his was not a very competent opinion on art for which he had the 
antique dealer’s flair rather than any deep appreciation. But he was a 
powerful friend to make for Beardsley. Ross had the entrance to the 

47 


doors of fashion and power; he had a racy wit and was at heart a 
kindly man enough; and he had not only come to have considerable 
authority on matters of art and literature in the drawing-rooms of the 
great, but with editors. And he was doing much dealing in pictures. 
Ross, with his eternal quest of the fantastic and the unexpected, was 
fascinated by the strange originality and weird experience of the shy 
youth whom he describes as with “rather long hair, which instead of 
being ebouriffé as the ordinary genius is expected to wear it, was 
brushed smoothly and flatly on his head and over part of his im- 
mensely high and narrow brow.” Beardsley’s hair never gave me the 
impression of being brown; Max Beerbohm once described it better 

s “tortoise-shell”—it was an extraordinary colour, as artificial as 
his voice and manner. The “terribly drawn and emaciated face” was 
always cadaverous. The young fellow seems gradually to have thawed 
at this forgathering at Vallance’s, losing his shyness in congenial com- 
pany, and was soon found to have an intimate knowledge of the 
British Museum and National Gallery. He talked more of literature 
and of music than of art. Ross was so affected by the originality of the 
young fellow’s conversation that he even attributed to Beardsley the 
oft-quoted jape of the old French wit that “it only takes one man to 
make an artist but forty to make an Academician.” 

It is well to try and discover what drew the fulsome praise of 
Beardsley’s genius from Ross at this first meeting—what precisely 
did Ross see in the inevitable portfolio which Beardsley carried under 
his arm as he entered the room? As regards whatever drawings were 
in the portfolio, Beardsley had evidently lately drawn the Procession 
of Joan of Arc in pencil which afterwards passed to Frederick Evans, 

48 


” be be Th ee 


a work which Beardsley at this time considered the only thing with 
any merit from his own hands, and from which he could not be in- 
duced to part for all Ross’s bribes, though he undertook to make a 
pen-and-ink replica from it for him, which he delivered to Ross in the 
May of 1892. The youngster had a truer and more just estimate of his 
own work than had his admirers. 

It is well to note at this stage that by mid-1892, on the eve of his 
twentieth year, Beardsley was so utterly mediocre in all artistic prom- 
ise, to say nothing of achievement, that this commonplace Procession 
of Joan of Arc could stand out at the forefront of his career, and was, 
as we Shall soon see, to be widely exploited in order to get him public 
recognition—in which it distinctly and deservedly failed. He himself 
was later to go hot and cold about the very mention of it and to be 
ashamed of it. . 

We have Ross’s word for it at this time that “except in his manner,”’ 
his general appearance altered little to the end. Indeed, if Beardsley 
could only have trodden under foot the painful conceit which his 
rapidly increasing artistic circle fanned by their praise and liking for 
him, he might have escaped the eventual applause and comradeship 
of that shallow company to whom he proceeded and amongst whom 
he loved to glitter, yet in moments of depression scorned. But it is 
canting and stupid and unjust to make out that Beardsley was dragged 
down. Nothing of the kind. The young fellow’s whole soul and taste 
drew about him, he was not compelled into, the company of the erotic 
and the precious in craftsmanship. And Robert Ross had no small 
share in opening wide the doors to him. 

But it is well and only just to recognise without cant that by a cu- 

49 


rious paradox, if Beardsley had been content to live in the medieval 
atmosphere of the Aisthetic Movement into which his destiny now 
drifted him, for all its seriousness, its solemnity, and its fervour, 
his art and handling would have sunk to but recondite achievement 
at best. It was the wider range of the 18th century writers, especially 
the French writers—it was their challenge to the past—it was their 
very inquisition into and their very play with morals and eroticism, 
that brought the art of Beardsley to life where he might otherwise 
have remained, as he now was, solely concerned with craftsmanship. 
He was to run riot in eroticism—he was to treat sex with a marked 
frankness that showed it to be his god—but it is only right to say that 
the artist’s realm is the whole range of the human emotions; and he 
has as much right to utter the moods of sex as has the ordinary novel- 
ist of the “‘best seller’’ who relies on the discreet rousing of sexual 
moods in a more guarded and secret way, but who does rely on this 
mood nevertheless and above all for the creation of so-called “works 
that any girl may read.’ The whole business is simply a matter of 
degree. And there is far too much cant about it all. Sex is vital to the 
race. It is when sex is debauched that vice ensues; and it is in the 
measure in which Beardsley was to debauch sex in his designs or not 
that he is alone subject to blame or praise in the matter. 

Whilst Beardsley in voice and manner developed a repulsive con- 
ceit—it was a pose of such as wished to rise above suspicion of being 
of the middle-class to show contempt for the middle-class—he was 
one of the most modest of men about his art. A delightful and engag- 
ing smile he had for everyone. He liked to be liked. It was only in the 
loneliness of his own conceit that he posed to himself as a sort of bitter 


50 


Whistler hating his fellowman. It increased his friendliness and 
opened the gates to his intimate side if he felt that anyone appreciated 
his work; but he never expected anyone to be in the least artistic, and 
thought none the less of such for it. He would listen to and discuss 
criticism of his work with an aloof and open mind, without rancour or 
patronage or resentment; and what was more, he would often act on 
it, as we shall see. Beardsley was a very likeable fellow to meet. When 
he was not posing as the enemy of the middle-classes he was a charm- 
ing and witty companion. 

Meantime, in the late Spring or early Summer of 1892, Beardsley 
after a holiday, probably at Brighton, called on Burne-Jones again, 
and is said by some then to have made his attempt on Watts, so icily 
repelled. However, to Burne-Jones he went, urged to it largely by the 
ambition growing within him and fostered strenuously by Vallance 
and his friends, to dare all and make for art. | 

Burne-Jones received him with characteristic generosity. And re- 
member that Beardsley was now simply a blatant and unashamed 
mimic of Burne-Jones, and a pretty mediocre artist at that. We shall 
soon see a very different reception of the youth by a very different 
temperament. Burne-Jones, cordial and enthusiastic and sympathetic, 
gave the young fellow the soundest advice he ever had, saying that 
Beardsley “had learnt too much from the old masters and would bene- 
fit by the training of an art school.” From this interview young Beard- 
sley came back in high fettle. He drew a caricature of himself being 
kicked down the steps of the National Gallery by the old masters. 

This Summer of 1892 saw Beardsley in Paris, probably on a holi- 
day; and as probably with an introduction from Burne-Jones to Puvis 


ol 


de Chavannes, who received the young fellow well, and greatly en- 
couraged him, introducing him to one of his brother painters as “un 
jeune artiste Anglais qui fait des choses etonnantes.”’ 

Beardsley, with the astute earnestness with which he weighed all 
intelligent criticism, promptly followed the advice of Burne-Jones 
and Puvis de Chavannes, and put himself down to attend Professor 
Brown’s night-school at Westminster, whilst during the day he went 
on with his clerking at the Guardian Insurance Office. This schooling 
was to be of the scantiest, but it probably had one curious effect on 
his art—the Japanese art was on the town, so was Whistler; the stu- 
dios talked Japanese prints as today they talk Cubism and Blast. And 
it is significant that the drawing which Beardsley made of Professor 
Brown, perhaps the best work of his hands up to this time, is strongly 
influenced by the scratchy nervous line of Whistler’s etching and is 
spaced in the Japanese convention. The irony of this Whistlerianism 
is lost upon us if we forget the bitter antagonism of Whistler and 
Burne-Jones at this very time—Whistler had published his Gentle 
Art of Making Enemies in 1890, and London had not recovered from 
its enjoyment of the spites of the great ones. Beardsley himself used 
to say that he had not been to Brown’s more than half a dozen times, 
but his eager eyes were quick to see. 

However, renewed health, an enlarging circle of artistic friends, an 
occasional peep into the home of genius, hours snatched from the city 
and spent in bookshops, the British Museum, the National Gallery, 
the Opera and the Concert room, revived ambition. 

And Vallance, cheered by Burne-Jones’s reception of the youth 
now sought to clinch matters by bringing Beardsley at his most im- 
pressionable age into the charmed circle of William Morris. The gen- 


Ye 


erous soul of Vallance little understood Morris—or Beardsley; but 
his impulse was on all fours with his life-long devotion to the gifted 
boy’s cause. 

Before we eavesdrop at the William Morris meeting, let us rid our- 
selves of a few illusions that have gathered about Beardsley. First of 
all, Beardsley is on the edge of his twentieth birthday and has not 
made a drawing or shown a sign of anything but mediocre achieve- 
ment. Next—and perhaps this is the most surprising as it is an in- 
teresting fact—Beardsley had scarcely, if indeed at all, seen a speci- 
men of the Kelmscott books, their style, their decoration, or their 
content! Now Vallance, wrapped up in medievalism, and Frederick 
Evans handling rich and rare hobbies in book-binding, probably never 
realised that to Beardsley it might be a closed book, and worse— 
probably not very exhilarating if opened, except for the rich blackness 
of some of the conventionally decorated pages. It is very important 
to remember this. And we must be just to Morris. Before we step 
further a-tiptoe to Morris’s house, remember another fact; Beardsley 
was not a thinker, not an intellectual man. He was a born artist to his 
long slender finger-tips; he sucked all the honey from art, whether 
fiction or drawing or decoration of any kind with a feverish eagerness 
that made the world think that because he was wholly bookish, he was 
therefore intellectual. He was remarkably unintellectual. He was a 
pure artist in that he was concerned wholly with the emotions, with 
his feelings, with the impressions that life or books made upon his 
senses. But he knew absolutely nothing of world questions. Beardsley 
knew and cared nothing for world affairs, knew and cared as much 
about deep social injustices or rights or struggles as a housemaid. 
They did not concern him, and he had but a yawn for such things. 

33 


eae a ATO ae » 
aay eee Ara) a ~ a0 
¥ ‘ 
7 


Social questions bored him undisguisedly. Indeed by Social he would 
only have understood the society of the great—his idea of it was 
an extravagantly dressed society of polished people with elaborate 
manners, who despised the middle-class virtues as being rather vul- 
gar, who lived in a romantic whirl of exquisite flippancies not without 
picturesque adultery, doing each one as the mood took him—only 
doing it with an air and dressing well for the part. 

Unfortunately, we have not been given Beardsley’s correspondence 
of these days, and the German edition of his letters has not been done 
into English; but read Beardsley’s letters during the last terrible years 
of his short life to his friend the poet Gray who became a priest, and 
you will be amazed by the absence of any intellectual or social interest 
of any kind whatsoever in the great questions that were racking the 
age. They might be the letters of a humdrum schoolboy—they even 
lack manhood—they do not suggest quite a fully developed intelli- 
gence. 

However, Morris had frequently of late expressed to Vallance his 
troubled state in getting “suitable illustrations” for his Kelmscott 
books—he was particularly plagued about the reprint he was then 
anxious to produce—Sidonia the Sorceress. Vallance leaped at the 
chance of getting the opening for young Beardsley; and at once per- 
suaded Beardsley to make a drawing, add it to his portfolio, and all 
being ready, on a fine Sunday afternoon in the early summer of 1892, 
his portfolio under his arm, Beardsley with Vallance made their way 
to Hammersmith and entered the gates of the great man. Morris re- 
ceived the young man courteously. But he was about to be asked to 
swallow a ridiculous pill. 

We have seen that up to this time the portfolio was empty of all but 

o4 


mediocrity—a Burne-Jonesesque or so at best. To put the froth on 
the black trouble, Vallance had evidently never thought of the utter 
unfitness of Beardsley’s scratchy pen-drawn Japanesque grotesques 
for the Kelmscott Press; whilst Beardsley probably did not know what 
the Kelmscott Press meant. He was soon to know—and to achieve. 
Can one imagine a more fantastic act than taking this drawing to show 
to Morris? Imagine how a trivial, cheap, very tentative weak line, in 
grotesque swirls and wriggles, of Sidonia the Sorceress with the black 
cat appealed to Morris, who was as serious about the “‘fat blacks” of 
his Kelmscott decorations as about his first-born! Remember that up 
to this time Beardsley had not attempted his strong black line with 
flat black masses. Morris would have been a fool to commission this 
young fellow for the work, judging him by his then achievement. Let 
us go much further, Beardsley himself would not have been sure of 
fulfilling it—far less any of his sponsers. And yet! 


Could Morris but have drawn aside the curtain of the future a few 
narrow folds! Within a few days of that somewhat dishearting meet- 
ing of these two men, the young Beardsley was to be launching on a 
rival publication to the Kelmscott Press—he was to smash it to pieces 
and make a masterpiece of what the Kelmscott enthusiasm had never 
been able to lift above monotonous mechanism! The lad only had to 
brood awhile over a Kelmscott to beat it at every point—and Fred- 
erick Evans was about to give him the chance, and he was to beat it 
to a dull futility. Anything further removed from Beardsley’s vision 
and essence than medizvalism it would be hard to find; but when the 
problem was set him, he faced it; and it is a miracle that he made 
of it what he did. However, not a soul who had thus far seen his work, 
not one who was at Morris’s house that Sunday afternoon, could fore- 


D9 


see it. Morris least of all. Morris was too self-centred to foresee what 
this lank young lad from an insurance office meant to himself and all 
for which he stood in book illustration. Vallance, for all his personal 
affection and loyalty to Morris, was disappointed in that Morris failed 
to be aroused to any interest whatsoever over the drawings in Beard- 
sley’s portfolio. Morris went solemnly through the portfolio, thought 
little of the work, considered the features of the figures neither beau- 
tiful nor attractive, but probably trying to find something to praise, 
at last said “I see you have a feeling for draperies, and,” he added 
fatuously, “I should advise you to cultivate it”—and so saying he 
dismissed the whole subject. The eager youth was bitterly disap- 
pointed; but it is only fair to Beardsley to say that he was wounded 
by being repulsed and “‘not liked,” rather than that he was wounded 
about his drawings. It was a delightful trait in the man, his life long, 
that he was far more anxious for people to be friendly with him than 
to care for his drawings—he had no personal feeling whatsoever 
against anyone for disliking his work. The youth left the premises of 
William Morris with a fixed determination never to go there again— 
and he could never be induced to go. 

Within a few months of Beardsley’s shutting the gates of Kelmscott 
House on himself for the first and the last time, Vallance was to lead 
another forlorn hope to Morris on Beardsley’s behalf; but the lad re- 
fused to go, and Vallance went alone—but that is another story. For 
even as Morris shut the gates on Beardsley’s endeavour, there was to 
come another who was to fling open to Beardsley the gates to a far 
wider realm and enable him to pluck the beard of William Morris in 
the doing—one John Dent, a publisher. 

56 


This Formative Year of sheer Burne-Jonesesque mimicry was to end 
= of intense EES for the young city eds He was 


V 


BEARDSLEY BECOMES AN ARTIST 
Mid-1892 to Mid-1893—Twenty to twenty-one 


MEDIZVALISM AND THE HAIRY-LINE JAPANESQUES 


““LE MORTE D’ARTHUR’’ AND “‘BON MOTS’”” 


Joun M. DENT, then a young publisher, was fired with the ambition 
to put forth the great literary classics for the ordinary man in a way 
that should be within the reach of his purse, yet rival the vastly costly 
bookmaking of William Morris and his allies of the Kelmscott Press. 
Dent fixed upon Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur to lead the 
way in his venture; and he confided his scheme to his friend Frederick 
Evans of the Jones and Evans bookshop in Queen Street, Cheapside. 
He planned to publish the handsome book in parts—300 copies on 
Dutch hand-made paper and fifteen hundred ordinary copies; but he 
was troubled and at his wit’s end as to a fitting decorator and illus- 
trator. He must have a fresh and original artist. 

Frederick Evans and John Dent were talking over this perplexity 
in the Cheapside bookshop when Evans suddenly remarked to Dent 
that he believed he had found for him the very man; and he was 
showing to Dent Beardsley’s Hail Mary, when, looking up, he whis- 
pered: “‘and here he comes!” There entered a spick-and-span shadow 
of a young man like one risen from the well-dressed dead—Aubrey 
Beardsley had happened in, according to his daily wont, strolling over 
at the luncheon hour from the Guardian Insurance Office hard by for 

38 


ahs =; 
i ee 
a a 


HAIL MARY 


his midday rummage amongst the books. It was like a gift from the 
gods! Frederick Evans nudged the other’s arm, pointing towards the 
strange youth, and repeated: ““There’s your man!”’ 

To Beardsley’s surprise, Evans beckoned him towards his desk 
where he was in earnest colloquy with the man whom the young fellow 
was now to discover to be the well-known publisher. 

So Beardsley and J. M. Dent met. 

Introducing the youthful dandy to Dent as the ideal illustrator for 
his “‘Morte d’ Arthur,” Evans somewhat bewildered Beardsley; the 
sudden splendour of the opportunity to prove his gifts rather took 
him aback. Dent however told the youth reassuringly that the recom- 
mendation of Frederick Evans was in itself enough, but if Beardsley 
would make him a drawing and prove his decorative gifts for this 
particular book, he would at once commission him to illustrate the 
work. 

Beardsley, frantically delighted and excited, undertook to draw a 
specimen design for Dent’s decision; yet had his hesitant modesties. 
Remember that up to this time he had practically drawn nothing of 
any consequence—he was utterly unknown—and his superb master- 
work that was to be, so different from and so little akin in any way to 
medizvalism, was hidden even from his own vision. The few drawings 
he had made were in mimicry of Burne-Jones and promised well 
enough for a medieval missal in a pretty-pretty sort of way. He was 
becoming a trifle old for studentship—he was twenty before he made 
a drawing that was not mediocre. He had never seen one of the elab- 
orate Morris books, and Frederick Evans had to show him a Kelm- 
scott in order to give him some idea of what was in Dent’s mind—of 
what was expected of him. | 

61 


At last he made to depart; and, shaking hands with Frederick 
Evans at the shop-door, he hesitated and,. speaking low, said: “It’s: 
too good a chance. I’m sure I shan’t be equal to it. I am not worthy of 
it.”” Evans assured him that he only had to set himself to it and alk 
would be well. | 

Within a few days, Beardsley putting forth all his powers to create 
the finest thing he could, and making an eager study of the Kelmscott 
tradition, took the drawing to Dent—the elaborate and now famous 
Burne-Jonesesque design which is known as The Achieving of the 
San Grael, which must have been as much a revelation of his powers 
to the youth himself as it was to Dent. The drawing was destined to 
appear in gravure as the frontispiece to. the Second volume of the 
Morte d Arthur. 

Now it is most important to note that this, Beardsley’s first serious 
original work, shows him in mid-1892, at twenty, to have made a bold 
effort to create a marked style by combining his Burne-Jonesesque 
medizvalism with his Japanesques of the Hairy Line; and the design 
is signed with his early “Japanesque mark.’ It is his first use of the 
Japanesque mark. Any designs signed with his name before this time 
reveal unmistakably the initials A. V. B. The early “Japanesque 
mark”’ is always stunted and rude. Beardsley’s candlesticks were a 
sort of mascot to him; and I feel sure that the Japanese mark was 
meant for three candles and three flames—a baser explanation was 
given by some, but it was only the evil thought of those who tried to 
see evil in all that Beardsley did. 

Dent at once commissioned the youth to illustrate and decorate the 
Morte d’Arthur, which was to begin to appear in parts a year there- 
after, in the June of 1893—the second volume in 1894. 

62 


ON ee ee ee eee Ts fe Pe 


~~? 


‘So Aubrey Beardsley entered upon his first great undertaking—to 
mimic the medieval woodcut or what the Morris School took to be the 
medizval woodcut and—to better his instruction. Frederick Evans 
set the diadem of his realm upon the lad’s brow in a bookshop in 
Cheapside; and John Dent threw open the gates to that fantastic realm 
so that he might enter in. With the prospect of an art career, Beard- 
sley was now to have the extraordinary good fortune to meet a literary 
man who was to vaunt him before the world and reveal him to the 


public—Lewis C. Hind. 


Boldly launching on an artistic career, encouraged by this elabo- 
rate and important work for Dent, Beardsley, at his sister’s strong 
urging and solicitation, about his twentieth birthday resigned his 
clerkship in the Guardian Insurance Office and for good and all turned 
his back on the city. At the same time, feeling that the British Museum 
and the National Gallery gave him more teaching than he was getting 
at the studio, he withdrew from Brown’s school at Westminster. Be- 
ing now in close touch with Dent, and having his day free, Beardsley 
was asked to make some grotesques for the three little volumes of 
Bon Mots by famous wits which Dent was about to publish. So it came 
about that Beardsley poured out his Japanesque grotesques and Morte 
d Arthur medievalisms side by side! and was not too careful as to 
which was the grotesque and which the mediavalism. For the Bon 
Mots he made no pretence of illustration—the florid scribbling lines 
drew fantastic designs utterly unrelated to the text or atmosphere of 
the wits, and were about as thoroughly bad as illustrations in the vital 
quality of an illustration as could well be. In artistic achievement they 
were trivialities, mostly scratchy and tedious, some of them better 


63 


than others, but mostly revealing Beardsley’s defects and occasionally 
dragging him back perilously near to the puerilia of his boyhood. But 
the severe conditions and limitations of the Morte d’ Arthur page held 
Beardsley to good velvety blacks and strong line and masses, and were 
the finest education in art that he ever went through—for he taught 
himself craftsmanship as he went in the Morte d Arthur. It made him. 

One has only to look at the general mediocrity of the grotesques 
for the Bon Mots to realise what a severe self-discipline the solid 
black decorations of the medieval Morte d’ Arthur put upon Beardsley 
for the utterance of his genius. Beardsley knew full well that his 
whole career depended on those designs for the Morte d’ Arthur, and 
he strove to reach his full powers in making them. 

Anning Bell was at this time pouring out his bookplates and kin- 
dred designs, and in many of Beardsley’s drawings one could almost 
tell which of Anning Bell’s decorations he had been looking at last. 
To Walter Crane he owed less, but not a little. Greek vase-painting 
was not lost upon Beardsley, but as yet he had scant chance or leisure 
to make a thorough study of it, as he was to do later to the prodigious 
enhancement of his powers; he was content as yet to acknowledge his 
debt to Greece through Anning Bell. 

We know from Beardsley’s letters to his old school that he was 
during this autumn at work upon drawings for Miss Burney’s Evelina 
and, whether they have vanished or were never completed, on draw- 
ings for Hawthorne’s Tales and Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling. 

Such writers as recall the early Beardsley recall him through the 
glamour that colours their backward glancing from the graveside 
of achieved genius. The “revelations on opening the portfolio” are 
written “after the event,’ when the contents of the portfolio have 

64. 


been forgotten and deluding memory flings amongst their drab per- 
formance masterpieces rose-leafwise from the Rape of the Lock and 
The Savoy for makeweight. Beardsley did not “arrive”? at once—we 
are about to see him arrive. But once he found himself, his swift 
achievement is the more a marvel—almost a miracle. 

It was fortunate for Dent that Beardsley flung himself at the 
decoration of the Morte d’Arthur with almost mad enthusiasm. He 
knew that he had to “make good” or go down, and so back to the 
city. And he poured forth his designs in the quiet of his candles’ light, 
the blinds drawn, and London asleep—poured them forth in that se- 
cret atmosphere that detested an eyewitness to his craftsmanship and 
barred the door to all. Most folk would reason that Beardsley, being 
free of the city, had now his whole day to work; but the lay mind 
rarely grasps the fact that true artistic utterance is compact of mood 
and is outside mere industry or intellectual desire to work. To have 
more time meant a prodigious increase in Beardsley’s powers to brood 
upon his art but not to create it. Not a bit of it. He was about the most 
sociable butterfly that ever enjoyed the sunshine of life as it passed. 
By day he haunted the British Museum, the bookshops, the print- 
shops, or paid social calls, delighting to go to the Café Royal and such 
places. No one ever saw him work. He loved music above all the arts. 
In the coming years, when he was to be a vogue for a brief season, 
people would ask when Beardsley worked—he was everywhere 
—but for answer he only laughed gleefully, his pose being that he 
never worked nor had need to work. He had as yet no footing in 
the houses of the great; and it was fortunate for his art that he had 
not, for he was steeping himself in all that touched or enhanced that 
art. 

65 


Beardsley, when he sat down to his table to create art, came to his 
effort with no cant about inspiration. He set himself an idea to fulfil, 
and the paper on which he rough-pencilled that idea was the only 
sketch he made for the completed design—when the pen and ink had 
next done their work, the pencil vanished under the eliminating rub- 
ber. The well-known pencil sketch of A Girl owned by Mr. Evans 
shows Beardsley selecting the firm line of the face from amidst the 
rough rhythm of his scrawls. | 

A great deal has been made of Beardsley’s only working by candle- 
light; as a matter of fact there is nothing unusual in an artist, whether 
of the pen or the brush, who does not employ colour, making night 
into day. It is an affair of temperament, though of course Beardsley 
was quite justified in posing as a genius thereby if it helped him to 
recognition. 

Beardsley’s career had made it impossible for him to work except 
at night; and by the time his day was free to him he was set by habit 
into working at night. There would be nothing unnatural in his shut- 
ting out the daylight and lighting his candles if he were seized by the 
mood to work by day. He shared with far greater artists than he the 
dislike of being seen at work, and is said to have shut out even his 
mother and sister when drawing; and, like Turner, when caught at 
the job he hurriedly hid away the tools of his craft; pens, ink, paper, 
and drawing upon the paper, were all thrust away at once. No one 
has ever been known to see him at work. He did not draw from a 
model. We can judge better by his unfinished designs—than from 
any record by eyewitnesses—that he finished his drawing in ink on 
the piece of paper on which he began it, without sketch or study— 
that he began by vague pencil scrawls and rough lines to indicate 

66 


PENCIL SKETCH OF A CHILD 


the general rhythm and composition and balance of the thing as a 
whole—that he then drew in with firmer pencil lines the main design 
—and then inked in the pen-line and masses. 

Now, Beardsley being a born poser, and seeing that the philistine 
mind of the hack-journalist was focused on getting a “story,” astutely 
made much of his only being able to work by candlelight as he drew 
the journalistic romance-mongering eyes to the two candlesticks of 
the Empire period, and encouraged their suggestion that he brought 
forth the masterpiece only under their spell. It was good copy; and it 
spread him by advertisement. Besides, it sounded fearsomely “‘orig- 
inal,” and held a taint of genius. And there was something almost 
deliciously wicked in the subtle confession: “‘I am happiest when the 
lamps of the town have been lit.”” He must be at all costs “‘the devil 
of a fellow.” 

Beardsley arranged the room, in his father’s and mother’s house, 
which was his first studio so that it should fit his career as artist. He 
received his visitors in this scarlet room, seated at a small table on 
which stood two tall tapering candlesticks—the candlesticks without 
which he could not work. And his affectations and artificialities of 
pose and conversation were at this time almost painful. But he was . 
very young and very ambitious, and had not yet achieved much 
else than pose whereon to lean for reputation. 


His rapid increase of power—and one now begins to understand 
Vallance’s enthusiasm—induced Vallance to make a last bid to win 
the favour of Morris for the gifted Aubrey. It was about Yuletide of 
1892, half a year after Morris’s rebuff had so deeply wounded the 
youth, that Vallance, who could not persuade Beardsley to move an- 


69 


other foot towards Morris’s house a second time, induced the young 
fellow to let him have a printed proof from the Morte d’ Arthur of The 
Lady of the Lake telling Arthur of the sword Excalibur to show to 
Morris. Several of Morris’s friends were present when Vallance ar- 
rived. Now again we must try and get into Morris’s skin. He was 
shown a black and white decoration for the printed page made by a 
young fellow who, a few months before, had been so utterly ignorant 
of the world-shattering revolution in bookmaking at the Kelmscott 
Press that he had actually offered his services on the strength of a 
trumpery grotesque in poor imitation of a Japanese drawing, which 
of course would have fitted quaintly with Caxton’s printed books! 
but here, by Thor and Hammersmith, was the selfsame young coxs- 
comb, mastering the Kelmscott idea and in one fell drawing surpass- 
ing it and making the whole achievement of Morris’s earnest workers 
look tricky and meretricious and unutterably dull! Of course there 
was a storm of anger from Morris. 

Morris’s hot indignation at what he called “an act of usurpation” 
which he could not permit, revealed to Vallance the sad fact that any 
hope of these two men working together was futile. ““A man ought to 
do his own work,” roared Morris, quite forgetting how he was as busy 
as a burglar filching from Caxton and medieval Europe. However, so 
hotly did Morris feel about the whole business that it was only at Sir 
Edward Burne-Jones’s earnest urging that Morris was prevented from 
writing an angry remonstrance to Dent. 

How Morris fulfilled his vaunted aim of lifting printing to its old 
glory by attacking any and every body else who likewise strove, is not 
easy to explain. But here we may pause for a moment to discuss a 
point much misunderstood in Beardsley’s career. Vallance, a man of 

70 


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HOW QUEEN GUENEVER MADE HER A NUN 


from “Le Morte D’Arthur” 


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high integrity and noble ideals, sadly deplores the loss both to Beards- 
ley and to Morris himself through Morris treating the young fellow 
as a rival instead of an ally. But whatever loss it may have been to 
Morris, it was as a fact a vast gain to Beardsley. Beardsley pricked the 
bubble of the medizval “‘fake’”’ in books; but had he instead entered 
into the Morris circle he would have begun and ended as a mediocrity. 
He had the craftsmanship to surpass the Kelmscott Press; but he had 
in his being no whit in common with medievalism. Art has nothing to 
do with beauty or ugliness or the things that Morris and his age mis- 
took for art. It is a far vaster and mightier significance than all that. 
And the tragic part of the lad’s destiny lay in this: he had either to 
sink his powers in the “art-fake” that his clean-soul’d and noble- 
hearted friend took to be art, or he had to pursue the vital and true 
art of uttering what emotions life most intensely revealed to him, even 
though, in the doing, he had to wallow with swine. And let us have 
no cant about it: the “medizval’’ decorations for the Morte d’ Arthur 
were soon revealing that overwhelming eroticism, that inquisition into 
sex, which dominated Beardsley’s whole artistic soul from the day he 
turned his back on the city and became an artist. Beardsley would 
never have been, could never have been, a great artist in the Morris 
circle, or in seeking to restore a dead age through medieval research. 
That there was no need for him to go to the other extreme and asso- 
ciate with men of questionable habits, low codes of honour, and 
licentious life, is quite true; but the sad part of the business was, as 
we shall see, that it was precisely just such men who alone enabled 
the young fellow to create his master-work where others would have 
let him starve and the music die in him unsung. 

William Morris was to die in the October of 1896, four years there- 

73 


after, but he was to live long enough to see the lad he envied outrival 
him in his “medieval fake’’—find himself—and give to the world in 
The Savoy a series of decorations that have made his name immortal 
and placed his art amongst the supreme achievement of the ages, 
where William Morris’s vaunted decorated printed page is become an 
elaborate boredom. 


Morris was not the only one who baffled the efforts of Vallance to get 
the young Beardsley a hearing. By John Lane, fantastically enough, 
he was also to be rejected! Beardsley was always full of vast schemes 
and plans; one of these at the moment was the illustrating of Mer- 
edith’s Shaving of Shagpat—a desire to which he returned and on 
which he harped again and again. Vallance, hoping that John Lane, 
a member of the firm of Elkin Mathews and John Lane, then new and 
unconventional publishers, would become the bridge to achievement, 
brought about a meeting between Beardsley and John Lane at a small 
gathering at Vallance’s rooms as Yuletide drew near. But John Lane 
was not impressed; and nothing came of it. It was rather an irony of 
fate that Beardsley, who resented this rejection by John Lane, for 
some reason, with considerable bitterness, was in a twelvemonth to 
be eagerly sought after by the same John Lane to their mutual suc- 
cess, Increase in reputation, triumph, and prodigious advertisement. 

However neither the frown of William Morris, nor the icy aloofness 
of Watts, nor the indifference of John Lane, could chill the ardour of 
the young Aubrey Beardsley. He was free. He had two big commis- 
sions. His health greatly improved. He was happy in his work. Hay- 
ing mastered the possibilities and the limitations of the Kelmscott 
book decoration, he concentrated on surpassing it. At once his line 


74: 


began to put on strength. And the Japanese convention tickled him 
hugely—here he could use his line without troubling about floor or 
ceiling or perspective in which to place his figures. He could relieve 
the monotony of the heavy Morte d’Arthur convention by drawing 
fantasies in this Japanesque vein for Bon Mots, both conventions 
rooted whimsically enough in Burne-Jonesesques. And so it came 
that his first half-year as an artist saw him pouring out work of a 
quality never before even hinted at as being latent in him. 


Such then was the state of affairs when, with the inevitable black 
portfolio containing work really worth looking at under his arm, the 
young fellow in his twenty-first year was to be led by Vallance into 
the inestimable good fortune of meeting a man who was to bring his 
achievement into the public eye and champion his interests at every 
hand his life long. 

The year before the lad Beardsley left the Brighton Grammar 
School to enter upon a commercial career in the city, in 1887 there 
had left the city and entered upon a literary life, as subeditor of The 
Art Journal, Lewis C. Hind. Five years of such apprenticeship done, 
Hind had given up the magazine in 1892 in order to start a new art 
magazine for students. Hind had had a copy privately printed as a 
sort of “dummy,” which he showed to his friend and fellow-clubman 
John Lane, then on his part becoming a publisher. It so happened 
that a very astute and successful business-man in the Japanese trade 
called Charles Holme who lived at the Red House at Bexley Heath, 
the once home of William Morris, had an ambition to create an art 
magazine. John Lane, the friend of both men, brought them together 
—and in the December of 1892 the contract was signed between 


75 


Charles Holme and Lewis Hind—and The Studio, as it was christened 
by Hind to Holme’s great satisfaction, began to take shape. Hind saw 
the commercial flair of Charles Holme as his best asset-—Holme saw 
Hind in the editorial chair as his best asset. 

So the new year of 1893 dawned. It was the habit of Lewis Hind 
to go of a Sunday afternoon to the tea-time gatherings of the literary 
and artistic friends of Wilfred and Alice Meynell at their house in Pal- 
ace Court; and it was on one of these occasions, early in the January 
of 1893, that Aymer Vallance entered with a tall slender “hatchet- 
faced” pallid youth. Hind, weary of pictures and drawings over which 
he had been poring for weeks in his search for subjects for his new 
magazine, was listening peacefully to the music of Vernon Blackburn 
who was playing one of his own songs at the piano, when the stillness 
of the room was broken by the entry of the two new visitors. In an 
absent mood he suddenly became aware that Vallance had moved to 
his side with his young friend. He looked up at the youth who stood 
by Vallance’s elbow and became aware of a lanky figure with a big 
nose, and yellow hair plastered down in a “quiff” or fringe across his 
forehead much in the style of Phil May—a pallid silent young man, 
but self-confident, self-assured, alert and watchful—with the inevi- 
table black portfolio under his arm; the insurance clerk, Aubrey 
Beardsley. Hind, disinclined for art babble, weary of undiscovered 
“geniuses” being foisted upon him, but melting under the hot en- 
thusiasm of Vallance, at last asked the pale youth to show him his 
drawings. On looking through Beardsley’s portfolio, Hind at once de- 
cided that here at any rate was work of genius. Now let us remember 
that this sophisticated youth of the blasé air was not yet twenty-one. 
In that portfolio Hind tells us were the two frontispieces for Le Morte 

76 


d@ Arthur, the Siegfried Act II, the Birthday of Madame Cigale—Les 
Revenants de Musique—‘‘Some Salome drawings’”—with several 
chapter-headings and tailpieces for the Morte d’ Arthur. Hind’s mem- 
ory probably tricked him as to the Salome drawings; for, in refreshing 
his memory, likely as not, he looked at the first number of The Studio 
published three months later. Wilde’s Salome did not see print until 
February, a full month afterwards and was quite unknown. 
However, Hind at once offered the pages of his new art venture, 
The Studio, to the delighted youth. What was more, he arranged that 
Beardsley should bring his drawings the next morning to The Studio 
offices. When he did so, Charles Holme was quick to support Hind; 
indeed, to encourage the youngster, he there and then bought the 
drawings themselves from the thrilled Aubrey. 

Hind commissioned Joseph Pennell, as being one of the widest- 
read critics, to write the appreciation of the designs, and blazon 
Beardsley abroad—and whilst Pennell was frankly more than a little 
perplexed by all the enthusiasm poured into his ears, he undertook 
the job. But Hind, though he remained to the end the lad’s friend and 
greatly liked him, was not to be his editor after all. William Waldorf 
Astor, the millionaire, had bought the daily Pall Mall Gazette and 
the weekly Pall Mall Budget and was launching a new monthly to 
be called The Pall Mali Magazine. Lord Brownlow’s nephew, Harry 
Cust, appointed editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, asked Hind to be- 
come editor of the weekly Budget at a handsome salary; and Hind, 
thus having to look about of a sudden for someone to replace himself 
as editor of the new art magazine, about to be launched, found Glee- 
son White to take command of The Studio in his stead. But even 
as he set Gleeson White in the vacant editorial chair, Hind took 
(He 


Beardsley with him also to what was to be Hind’s three years editor- 
ship of the Pall Mall Budget, for which, unfortunately, the young 
fellow wrought little but such unmitigated trash as must have some- 
what dumbfounded Hind. 

So the first number of The Studio was to appear in the April of 
1893 glorifying a wonderful youth—his name Aubrey Beardsley! 


It was thus also, through Lewis Hind, that the young Beardsley had 
the good fortune to meet Gleeson White. Of the men who made the 
artistic and literary life of London at this time, Gleeson White was one 
of the largest of vision, the soundest in taste, the most generous in 


encouragement. A strangely modest man, he was said to have invented 


much of the wit of the ‘nineties given to others’ tongues, for he had 
the strange conceit of crediting the man with uttering the witticism 
who looked as if he ought to have said it. That was usurpation which 
men like Whistler and Wilde could forgive—and they forgave Glee- 
son White much. Gleeson White, who was well known in the Arts and 
Crafts movement of the day that hinged on Morris, leaped with joy 
at Hind’s offer to make him editor of a magazine that was to voice the 
aspirations and to blaze forth the achievements of the Arts and Crafts 
men. 

On the eve of publication, Hind and Gleeson White asked for a 
cover design for The Studio from the much gratified youth, who went 
home thrilled with the prospect that set his soul on fire—here was 
réclame! as he always preferred to call being advertised, or what the 
studios call being “boosted.” Indeed, was not Beardsley to appear in 
the first number of The Studio after Frank Brangwyn, then beginning 

78 


to come to the front, in a special article devoted to his work by Pen- 
nell, the most vocal of critics, with illustrations from the portfolio in 
his several styles—the Japanesque, and the medieval Morte d’Arthur 
blackletter? Was it not to be a tribute to “a new illustrator’? In Pen- 
nell there stepped into the young Beardsley’s life a man who could 
make his voice heard, and, thanks to Hind, he was to champion the 
lad through rain and shine, through black and sunny days. And what 
was of prodigious value to Beardsley, Pennell did not gush irrele- 
vantly nor over-rate his worth as did so many—he gave it just and 
fair and full value. 

All the same we must not make too much of Beardsley’s indebted- 
ness to the first number of The Studio in bringing him before the pub- 
lic. Pennell had the advantage of seeing a portfolio which really did 
contain very remarkable work—at the same time it was scarcely 
world-shattering—and it is to Pennell’s eternal credit for artistic hon- 
esty and critical judgment that he did not advertise it at anything more 
than its solid value. Pennell was writing for a new magazine of arts 
and crafts; and his fierce championship of process-reproduction was 
as much a part of his aim as was Beardsley’s art—and all of us who 
have been saved from the vile debauching of our line-work by the 
average wood-engravers owe it largely to Pennell that process-repro- 
duction won through—and not least of all Beardsley. What Pennell 
says about Beardsley is sober and just and appreciative; but it was 
when Beardsley developed far vaster powers and rose to a marvellous 
style that Pennell championed him, most fitly, to the day he lay down 
and died. 

The first number of The Studio did not appear until the April of 

6) 


1893; it was the first public recognition of Aubrey Beardsley it is 
true; but an utterly ridiculous legend has grown around The Studio 
that it made Beardsley famous. It did absolutely nothing of the kind. 
The Studio itself was no particular success, far less any article in it. 
Tom, Dick, and Harry, did not understand it; were not interested 
greatly in the arts or crafts; and particularly were they bored by 
medizval stiffness, dinginess, gloom, and solemn uncomfortable 
pomp. Even the photographers had not at that time “‘gone into oak.” 
It was only in our little narrow artistic and literary world—and a very 
narrow inner circle at that—where The Studio caused any talk, and 
Beardsley interested not very excitedly. We had grown rather blasé 
to medizvalism; had begun to find it out; and the Japanesque was a 
somewhat dinted toy—we preferred the Japanese masterpieces of the 
Japanese even to the fine bastard Japanesques of Whistler. So that, 
even in studio and literary salon, and at the tea-tables of the very 
earnest people with big red or yellow ties, untidy corduroy suits, and 
bilious aspirations after beauty, Beardsley at best was only one of the 
many subjects when he was a subject at all. It was bound to be so— 
he had done no great work as far as the public knew. Lewis Hind, who 
at the New Year had gone from The Studio offices to edit the Pall 
Mall Budget, in a fit of generous enthusiasm commissioned Beardsley 
to make caricatures or portrait-sketches at the play or opera or the 
like; and from the February of 1893 for some few weeks, Beardsley, 
utterly incompetent for the journalistic job, unfortunately damaged 
his reputation and nearly brought it to the gutter with a series of the 
most wretched drawings imaginable—drawings without one redeem- 
ing shred of value—work almost inconceivable as being from the 
same hands that were decorating the Morte d’ Arthur, which however 


80 


A 77, 


the public had not yet seen, for it did not begin to appear in print 
until the mid-year. But, as a matter of fact, most of the designs for 
Morte d’ Arthur were made by the time that Beardsley began his mis- 
erable venture in the Pall Mall Budget. The first volume of Bon Mots 
appeared in the April of 1893—the Sydney Smith and Sheridan vol- 
ume—although few heard of or saw the little book, and none paid it 
respect. It was pretty poor stuff. 


Now, though the Morte d’Arthur was in large part done before The 
Studio eulogy by Pennell appeared in this April of 1893, otherwise 
the eulogy would never have been written, it is well to cast a glance at 
Beardsley’s art as it was first revealed to an indifferent public in The 
Studio article. There are examples from the Morte d’Arthur, of which 
the very fine chapter-heading of the knights in combat on foot 
amongst the dandelion-like leaves of a forest, with their sword-like 
decoration, was enough to have made any reputation. The most medio- 
cre design of the lot, a tedious piece of Renaissance mimicry of Man- 
tegna called The Procession of Joan of Arc entering Orleans was cu- 
riously enough the favourite work of Beardsley’s own choice a year 
gone by when he made it—so far had he now advanced beyond this 
commonplace untidy emptiness! Yet the writers on art seem to have 
been more impressed by this futility than by the far more masterly 
Morte d’ Arthur decorations. If the writers were at sea, the public can 
scarce be blamed. The Siegfried Act II of mid-1892, which Beardsley 
had given to his patron Burne-Jones, shows excellent, if weird and 
fantastic, combination by Beardsley of his Japanesque and Burne- 
Jonesesque mimicry— it is his typically early or “‘hairy-line” Japan- 
esque, hesitant in stroke and thin in quality. The Birthday of Madame 
81 


Cigale and Les Revenants de Musique show the Japanesque more as- 
serting itself over the mock medieval, and are akin to Le Debris d’un 
Poéte and La Femme Incomprise. But there was also a Japanesque in 
The Studio which was to have an effect on Beardsley’s destiny that he 
little foresaw! There had been published in the February of 1893 
in French the play called Salome by Oscar Wilde, which made an ex- 
traordinary sensation in literary circles and in the Press. Throughout 
the newspapers was much controversy about the leopard-like ecstasy 
of Salome when the head of John the Baptist has been given to her 
on a salver: “J’ai baisé ta bouche, Iokanaan; j’ai baisé ta bouche.” 
Beardsley, struck by the lines, made his now famous Japanesque 
drawing, just in time to be included in The Studio which was to ap- 
pear in April. It was this design that, a few weeks later, decided Elkin 
Mathews and John Lane that in Beardsley they had found the des- 
tined illustrator of the English Salome, translated by Lord Alfred 
Douglas, which was soon to appear. In that Salome was to be a mar- 
vellous significance for Aubrey Beardsley. 

It is interesting to note in surveying the first number of The Studio, 
the rapid development of Beardsley’s art from the fussy flourishy 
design of this Salome drawing to the more severe and restrained edi- 
tion of the same design that was so soon to appear in the book. The 
hairy Japanesque line has departed. ; 

Note also another fact: The title of the article published in The 
Studio first number shows that in March 1893 when it was written 
at latest, Beardsley had decided to drop his middle name of Vincent; 
and the V forthwith disappears from the initials and signature to his 
work—the last time it was employed was on the indifferent large pen- 
eil drawing of Sandro Botticelli made in 1893 about the time that The 

82 


‘ 
P 
s 


eee Ves 
-’ a . 
; é 


Studio was to appear, as Vallance tells us, having been made by 
Beardsley to prove his own contention that an artist made his figures 
unconsciously like himself, whereupon at Vallance’s challenge he 
proceeded to build a Sandro Botticelli from Botticelli’s paintings. 
Vallance is unlikely to have made a mistake about the date, but the 
work has the hesitation and the lack of drawing and of decision of the 
year before. 

Above all, an absolutely new style has been born. Faked Medizval- 
ism is dead—and buried. Whistler’s Peacock Room has triumphed. 
Is it possible that Beardsley’s visit to the Peacock Room was at this 
time, and not so early as 1891? At any rate Beardsley is now to mimic 
Whistler’s peacocks so gorgeously painted on the shutters on the Pea- 
cock Room as he had heretofore imitated Burne-Jones. 


By his twenty-first birthday, then, Beardsley had praetically done 
with the Morte d’ Arthur; and it was only by the incessant prayers and 
supplications of Dent and the solemn urging of Frederick Evans to 
the young fellow to fulfil his word of honour and his bond, that 
Beardsley was persuaded, grudgingly, to make another design for it. 
He was wearied to tears by the book, and had utterly cast medizval- 
ism from him before he was through it. He was now intensely and fe- 
verishly concentrated on the development of the Japanesque. And 
he was for ever poring over the Greek vase-paintings at the British 
Museum. And another point must be pronounced, if we are to under- 
stand Beardsley; with returning bodily vigour he was encouraging 
: that erotic mania so noticeable in gifted consumptives, so that eroti- 
c cism became the dominant emotion and significance in life to him. He 
was steeping himself in study of phallic worship—and when all’s 
| 83 


said, the worship of sex has held a very important place in the earlier 
civilizations, and is implicit in much that is not so early. | 

It was indeed fortunate for Dent that he had procured most of 
the decorations he wanted for the Morte d’Arthur in the young fel- 
low’s first few months of vigorous enthusiasm for the book in the dy- 
ing end of the year of 1892, to which half year the Morte d’Arthur 
almost wholly belongs in Beardsley’s achievement. Dent was thereby 
enabled to launch on the publication of the parts in the June of 1893, 
about the time that Beardsley, changing his home, was to be turning 
his back on medizvalism and Burne-Jonesism for ever. It is obvious to 
such as search the book that the Morte d’ Arthur was never completed 
—we find designs doing duty towards the end again more than once— 
but Dent had secured enough to make this possible without offensive 
reiteration. 

There appeared in the Pall Mall Magazine for June 1893, drawn 
in April 1893, as the first Studio number was appearing, a design 
known as The Neophyte, or to give its full affected name, “Of a Neo- 
phyte, and how the Black Art was revealed unto him by the Fiend 
Asomuel” ; it was followed in the July number by a drawing of May 
1893 called The Kiss of Judas—both drawings reveal an unmistak- 
able change in handling, and the Neophyte a remarkable firmness of 
and form, and a strange hauntingness and atmosphere heretofore un- 
expressed. Beardsley had striven to reach it again and again in his 
Burne-Jonesque frontispiece to the Morte d’Arthur and kindred works 
in his “hairy line”; but the work of Carlos Schwabe and other so- 
called symbolists was being much talked of at this time, and several 
French illustrators were reaching quite wonderful effects through 

84, ue 


“OF A NEOPHYTE AND HOW THE BLACK ART WAS REVEALED 


UNTO HIM” 


it—it was not lost on Beardsley’s quick mind, especially its grotesque 
possibilities. 

It is easy for the layman and the business man to blame Beardsley 
for shrinking from fulfilling his bond as regards a contract for a long 
sequence of drawings to illustrate a book; but it is only just to recog- 
nise that it requires a frantic and maddening effort of will in any ar- 
tist to keep going back and employing a treatment that he has left 
behind him and rejected, and when he has advanced to such a hand- 
ling as The Neophyte. This difficulty for Beardsley will be more ob- 
vious to the lay mind a little further on. 


It is a peculiar irony that attributes Beardsley’s Morte d’Arthur 
phase to 1893-94; for whilst it is true that it was from mid-1893 


that the book began to be published. Beardsley had turned his back 
upon it for months—indeed his principal drawings had been made for 
it in late 1892, and only with difficulty could they be extracted from 
him even in early 1893! The second of the two elaborate drawings in 
his “hairy line” called The Questing Beast is dated by Beardsley 
himself ‘“‘March 8, 1893”—as for 1894, it would have been impossi- 
ble for Beardsley by that time to make such a drawing. Even as it is, 
the early 1893 decorations differ utterly from the more medieval 
or Burne-Jonesesques decorations of late 1892; and by the time 
the Morte d’ Arthur began to be given to the public, Beardsley, as we 
have seen, had completely rejected his whole Burne-Jones conven- 
tion. | | 

The two cover-designs for The Studio No. I in April 1893 were 
obviously drawn at the same time as the design for the covers of the 
Morte d’Arthur—in the early Spring of 1893. They could well be 
exchanged without the least loss. They practically write Finis to the 

87 


Morte d’Arthur drawings. They make a good full stop to the record 
of Beardsley’s achievement in his twentieth year. 
There is a story told of Dent’s anxieties over Beardsley’s exasper- 


ating procrastination in delivering the later drawings for the Morte 
d@ Arthur on the eve of its appearing in numbers. Dent called on 


Mrs. Beardsley to beg her influence with Beardsley to get on with the 
work. Mrs. Beardsley went upstairs at once to see Beardsley who 
was still in bed, and to remonstrate with him on Dent’s behalf. 
Beardsley, but half awake, lazily answered his mother’s chiding 
with: 


There was a young man with a salary 

Who had to do drawings for Malory; 

When they asked him for more, he replied “Why? Sure 
You’ve enough, as it is, for a gallery.” 


As Beardsley’s self chosen master, Watteau, had played with mim- 
icry of the Chinese genius in his Chinoiseries, so Beardsley at twenty, 
faithful to Watteau, played with mimicry of the Japanese genius. And 
as Whistler had set the vogue in his Japanesques by adopting a J apan- 
esque mark of a butterfly for signature, so Beardsley, not to be outdone 
in originality, now invented for himself his famous “Japanesque 
mark” of the three candles, with three flames—in the more elaborate 
later marks adding rounded puffs of candle-smoke—or as Beardsley 
himself called it, his “trademark.” To Beardsley his candles were as 
important a part of the tools of his craftsmanship as were his pen and 
88 


Fe ee ee ee eer a he oe Me Oe 


WA) | i See Rat dee 


paper and chinese ink; and it was but a fitting tribute to his light that 
he should make of it the emblem of his signature. But whether the 
“Japanesque mark’”’ be candles or not, from the time he began to em- 
ploy the Japanesque convention alongside of his medizvalism, for 
three years, until as we shall see he was expelled from The Yellow 
Book—his twentieth, twenty-first and twenty-second years—we shall 
find him employing the “Japanesque mark,” sometimes in addition 
to his name. So it is well to dwell upon it here. 

The early “Japanesque mark” of Beardsley’s twentieth year (mid 
1892 to mid-1893) was as we have seen, stunted, crude, and ill- 
shaped, and he employed it indifferently and incongruously on any 
type of his designs whether Morte d’ Arthur medizvalism or the Jap- 
anesque grotesques of his Bon Mots. And we have seen that it was 
in the middle of his twentieth year—he last used it in fact in the Feb- 
ruary of 1893—that he dropped the initial V for Vincent out of his 
initials and signature. He had employed A. V. B. in his Formative 
years. He signs henceforth as A. B. or A. Beardsley or even as 
Aubrey B. | 

In mid-1893, at twenty-one, we are about to see him launch upon 
his Salome designs, as weary of the Bon Mots grotesques as of the 
Morte d’Arthur medizvalism; and we shall see his “Japanesque 
mark” become long, slender, and graceful, often elaborate—the V 
quite departed from his signature. 

I have dwelt at length upon Beardsley’s “Japanesque mark,” or as 
he called it, his “trademark,” since his many forgers make the most 
amusing blunders by using the “J apanesque mark” in particular on 
forgeries of later styles when he had wholly abandoned it! 

89 


(af 
a 
& 


From mid-1892 to mid-1893, Beardsley then had advanced in crafts- 
manship by leaps and bounds, nevertheless he was unknown at 
twenty-one except to a small artistic circle. The Bon Mots grotesques, 
mostly done in the last half of 1892, began to appear, the first volume, 
Sydney Smith and Sheridan, in the April of 1893; the second volume 
at the year’s end, Lamb and Douglas Jerrold, in December 1893; 
and the third, the last volume, Foote and Hooke, in the February of 
1894, The Morte d’Arthur began to be published in parts in June 
1893. The feverish creation of the medieval designs in the late part 
of 1892 alongside of the Bon Mots grotesques had exhausted Beards- 
ley’s enthusiasm, and his style evaporated with the growth of his 
weariness—by mid-1893 he was finding the Morte d’Arthur “‘very 
long-winded.” And what chilled him most, he found the public in- 
different to both—yet Beardsley knew full well that his whole inter- 
est lay in publicity. 


It has been complained against Beardsley that he broke his bond. 
This is a larger question and a serious question—but it is a question. 
It depends wholly on whether he could fulfil his bond artistically, as 
well as on whether that bond were a just bargain. We will come to 
that. But it must be stressed that just as Beardsley had rapidly de- 
veloped his craftsmanship and style during his work upon the medi- 
evalism of the Morte d’Arthur, by that time he came near to the end 


90 


of the book he had advanced quite beyond the style he had created 
for it; so also his next development was as rapid, and by the time he 
is at the end of his new Japanese phase in Salome we shall see 
him again advancing so rapidly to a newer development of his style 
that he grew weary of the Salome before he completed it, and threw 
in a couple of illustrations as makeweight which are utterly alien to the 
work and disfigure it. And yet these two drawings were made imme- 
diately after working upon this Salome, and were thrown in only out 
of a certain sense of resentment owing to the suppression of two de- 
signs not deemed to be circumspect enough. But Beardlsey did not 
refuse to make new drawings in key with the rest—he had simply ad- 
vanced to a new style quite alien to Salome, and he found he could not 
go back. This will be clearer when we come to the Salome. 

So precisely with the Morte d Arthur; even the last decorations he 
made were more akin to his Greek Vase style in The Yellow Book. 


Before we leave the Morte d’ Arthur, and the difficulties with Beards- 
ley in which it ended, let us remember that artists and authors are 
often prone to ingratitude towards those who have led their steps to 
the ladder of Fame—and Beardsley was no exception. It was J. M. 
Dent who opened the gates for Beardsley to that realm which was to 
bring him the bays. Had it not been for Dent he would have died with 
his song wholly unsung—there would have been for him no Studio 
“réclame,” no Yellow Book, no Salome, no Savoy. Dent, employing 
with rare vision the budding genius of the youth, brought forth an 
edition of Sir Thomas Malory’s immortal Morte d’ Arthur which is a 
triumph for English bookmaking—he gave us the supreme edition 


Sar 


that can never be surpassed by mortal hands—he did so in a form 
within the reach of the ordinary man—and in the doing he made the 
much vaunted work of William Morris and his fellow-craftsmen ap- 
pear second-rate, mechanical, and over-ornate toys for millionaires. 


(dy 


HEADPIECE FROM “‘LE MORTE D’ARTHUR” 


92 


Lf 


a ane 
fain! one Be Ss - 2 


| Ne ll f Lily a 
SL, SN 
ao” aN ay) 


THE PEACOCK SKIRT 
from “Salome” 


ees oe ae 8 


VI 
THE JAPANESQUES 
Mid-1893 to the New Year of 1894—Twenty-One 
““SALOME 


ENTERED into the garden of his desire, by mid-1893 Beardsley was 
on the edge of manhood. 

We have seen that a year or two gone by, Beardsley is said to have 
paid a visit to Whistler’s notorious Peacock Room at Prince’s Gate. 
He really knew Japanese art in but its cheapest forms and in super- 
ficial fashion, and the bastard Japanesque designs for the decoration 
of this mock-Japanesque room greatly influenced Beardsley without 
much critical challenge from him, especially the tedious attenuated 
furniture and the thin square bars of the wooden fitments. They ap- 
pear in his designs of interiors for some time after this. His Japan- 
esque Caricature of Whistler on a seat, catching butterflies, is of this 
time. 

Now, the Letter to his musical friend Scotson Clark, describing 
his visit to Whistler’s Peacock Room, is evidently undated, but it is 
put down to the year of 1891. It may be so. But I suspect that it was 
of the early part of 1893—at any rate, if earlier, it is curious that its 
effect on Beardsley’s art lay in abeyance for a couple of years, and 
then suddenly, in the Spring and Summer of 1893, his art and crafts- 
manship burst forth in designs of the Salome founded frankly upon 
the convention of the superb peacocks on the shutters painted by 


95 


Sey | hee ae hee en 


Whistler for the Peacock Room. Why should this undisguised mimicry 
of Whistler have been delayed for two years? 

But—as the slyly hung indecent Japanese prints upon his walls at 
this time revealed to the seeing eye—it was now to the work of the 
better Japanese masters that he chiefly owed his passing pupillage to 
Japan. The erotic designs of the better Japanese artists, not being 
saleable for London drawing-rooms, were low-priced and within 
Beardsley’s reach. His own intellectual and moral eroticism was 
fiercely attracted by these erotic Japanese designs; indeed it was the 
sexualism of such Japanese masters that drew Beardsley to them quite 
as much as their wonderful rhythmic power to express sexual moods 
and adventures. It was from the time that Beardsley began to collect 
such Japanese prints by Utamaro and the rest that he gave rein to 
those leering features and libidinous ecstasies that became so domi- 
nating a factor of his Muse. These suggestive designs Beardsley him- 
self used to call by the sophisticated title of “galants.”’ The Greek 
vase-paintings were to add to this lewd suggestiveness an increased 
power later on. 


It was a fortunate thing for Beardsley that Dent who had begun to 
publish the Morte d’Arthur in parts in the June of 1893, as it had 
called attention to his illustrations; for, Elkin Mathews and John 
Lane now commissioned the young fellow to decorate the Englished 
edition of Oscar Wilde’s Salome, translated by Lord Alfred Douglas. 
The young fellow leaped at it—not only as giving him scope for fan- 
tastic designs but even more from the belief that the critics hotly dis- 
puting over Wilde’s play already, he would come into the public eye. 
96 


a hag aeie AT 


Elkin Mathews and John Lane showed remarkable judgment in their 
choice, founding their decision on the Japanesque drawing that 
Beardsley had made—either on reading the French edition, or on 
reading the widespread criticisms of the French editon by Wilde pub- 
lished in the February of 1893— illustrating the lines that raised so 
hot a controversy in the Press, “‘j’ai baisé ta bouche, Iokanaan; j’ai 
baisé ta bouche,”’ which as we have seen had appeared as one of the 
several illustrations to Pennell’s appreciation of ““A New Illustrator” 
at the birth of The Studio in the April of 1893, soon thereafter. 

Beardsley flung himself at the work with eager enthusiasm, turning 
his back on all that he had done or undertaken to do. Whatever bitter- 
ness he may have felt at his disappointment with John Lane, a year 
before, was now mollified by the recognition of his art in the com- 
mission for Salome. 

Now, it should be realised that Elkin Mathews and John Lane, at 
the Sign of the Bodley Head in Vigo Street, were developing a pub- 
lishing house quite unlike the ordinary publisher’s business of that 
day—they were encouraging the younger men or the less young who 
found scant support from the conventional makers of books; and they 
were bent on producing belles lettres in an attractive and picturesque 
form. This all greatly appealed to Beardsley. He was modern of the 
moderns. The heavy antique splendour and solemnities of the Kelm- 
scott reprints repulsed him nearly as much as the crass philistinism 
of the hack publishers. 

On the other hand, Elkin Mathews and John Lane took Beardsley 
rather on trust—the Morte d’Arthur and the Bon Mots were far from 
what they sought. And again let us give them the credit of remember- 
ing that Beardsley was but little known. 

97 


It would be difficult to imagine a man less competent to create the 
true atmosphere of the times and court of King Herod than Oscar 
Wilde—but he could achieve an Oxford-Athenian fantasy hung on 
Herodias as a peg. It would be as difficult to imagine a man less com- 
petent than Aubrey Beardsley to paint the true atmosphere of the 
times of King Herod—but he knew it, and acted accordingly. What 
he could do, and did do, was to weave a series of fantastic decorations 
about Wilde’s play which were as delightfully alien to the subject 
as was the play. Beardsley imagined it as a Japanese fantasy, as a 
bright Cockney would conceive Japan; he placed his drama in the 
Japan of Whistler’s Peacock Room; he did not attempt to illustrate 
the play by scenes, indeed was not greatly interested in the play, any 
more than in the Morte d’Arthur, but was wholly concerned with 
creating decorative schemes as a musician might create impressions 
in sound as stirred in his imagination by the suggestion of moods in 
the play—and he proceeded to lampoon the writer of it and to make a 
sequence of grotesques that pronounced the eroticism of the whole 
conception. The Wardour-Street jumble-sale of Greek terminal gods, 
Japanese costumes, and all the rest of it, is part of the fun. Beardsley 
revels in the farce. But his beheaded John the Baptist is without a 
touch’ of tragic power. 3 

It was a habit of Beardsley’s champions, as well as an admission, if 
reluctantly granted, by his bitterest assailants, throughout the Press, 
to praise Beardsley’s line. What exactly they meant, most would have 
been hard put to it to explain—it was a sort of philistine literary or 
journalistic concession to the volapuk of the studios. As the fact of line 
is perhaps more obvious in the Salome drawings than in the Savoy, 
since the Salome designs are largely line unrelated to mass, there are 


98 


even so-called critics to be found who place the Salome drawings at 
the topmost height of Beardsley’s achievement to this day! 

Most of this talk of Beardsley’s line was sheer literary cant, but 
happened to coincide with a reality. It is in the achievement of his line 
that Beardsley steps amongst the immortals, uttering his genius 
thereby. But the mere fact that any writer instances the Salome draw- 
ings in proof of the wonderful achievement of Beardsley’s line con- 
demns him as a futile appraiser. Beardsley, by intense and dogged 
application and consummate taste, mastered the pen-line until this, 
the most mulish instrument of the artist’s craftsmanship, at last sur- 
rendered its secrets to him, lost its hard rigidity, and yielded itself to 
his hand’s desire; and he came to employ it with so exquisite a mas- 
tery that he could compel it at will to yield music like the clear sus- 
tained notes of a violin. His line became emotional—grave or gay. 
But he had not achieved that complete mastery when he undertook, 
nor when he completed, the Salome, wherein his line is yet hesitant, 
thin, trying to do too much, though there is music in it; but it is stolen 
music, and he cannot conjure with it as can the genius of Japan. Lived 
never yet a man who could surpass the thing he aped. There lies the 
self-dug grave of every academy. Set the Salome against the genius 
of Japan, and how small a thing it is! Something is lacking. It is not 
great music, it is full of reminiscences. It fails to capture the senses. 
It is “very clever for a young man.” In Salome he got all that he 
could from the Japanese genius, an alien tongue; and in The Stomach 
Dance, the finest as it is the only really grossly indecent drawing of 
the sequence, he thrust the mimicry of the Japanese line as far as he 
could take it. By the time he had completed the Salome he was done 
with the Japanese mimicry. At the Yuletide of 1893 and thereafter, 

99 


eg is eae a 


he turned his back upon it. He had discovered that line alone has most 
serious limitations; it baulked him, its keen worshipper, as he, in- 
creased in power. And as a matter of fact, it is in the coruscating orig- 
inality of his invention, in the fertility of arrangement, and in the 
wide range of his flippant fantasy that the Salome designs reveal the 
increase of his powers as they reveal the widening range of his flight. 
He has near done with mimicry. He was weary of it, as he was weary 
of the limitations of the Japanese conventions, before he had com- 
pleted the swiftly drawn designs with feverish eager address in those 
few weeks of the late autumn; and by the time he came to write Finis 
to the work with the designs for the Title Page and List of Contents, 
he was done with emptiness—the groundless earth, the floating fig- 
ures in the air, the vague intersweep of figures and draperies, the reck- 
less lack of perspective—all are gone. Thereafter he plants his figures 
on firm earth where foothold is secure, goes back a little way to his 
triumphs in the Morte d’Arthur, and trained by his two conflicting 
guidances, the Japanesque and the medizvalesque, he creates a line 
that is Beardsley’s own voice and hand—neither the hand of Esau nor 
the voice of Jacob. When Beardsley laid down the book of Salome he 
had completed it with a final decoration which opened the gates 
to self-expression. When Beardsley closed the book of Salome he had 
found himself. His last great splendid mimicry was done. And as 
though to show his delight in it he sat down and drew the exquisite 
Burial of Salome in a powder-box in the very spirit of the eighteenth 
century whose child he was. 

Salome finished, however, was not ‘Salome published. Elkin Ma- 
thews and John Lane realised -that the drawings could not appear 
without certain mitigations, though, as a matter of fact, there were 

100 


but two gross indecencies in them. Both men were anxious to achieve 
public recognition for the gifted young fellow, and they knew him to 
be ‘“‘difficult.”” However, Gleeson White was consulted and he con- 
sulted me amongst others as an outside and independent opinion. 
Being greatly pleased by the suggestions that I made, Gleeson White 
put them forward, and told me they were warmly welcomed by the 
two troubled men who would have had to bear the brunt of the ob- 
loquy for any mistake or indiscretion. It was agreed to the satisfaction 
of all concerned that Beardsley should not touch the originals but 
should make alterations on the few offending proofs and that new 
blocks should then be made from the altered proofs, which, when all 
is said, required but little done to them, thereby preserving the orig- 
inal drawings intact. Thus the publication would offend no one’s sense 
of decorum—however much they might exasperate the taste. Odd to 
say, one or two ridiculously puritanical alterations were made whilst 
more offensive things were passed by! By consequence, the Title 
Page, and Enter Herodias were slightly altered simply to avoid offence 
to public taste; but I was astonished to find, on publication, that of 
the only two drawings that were deliberately and grossly obscene, The 
Stomach Dance appeared without change—was accepted without de- 
mur by the public and in silence by the censorious—aindeed the las- 
civiousness of the musician seems to have offended nobody’s eye; 
while the Toilette of Salome, a fine design, which only required a very 
slight correction, had been completely withdrawn with the quite inno- 
cent but very second-rate design of John and Salome, and in place of 
the two had been inserted the wretched Black Cape and Georgian 
Toilette which were not only utterly out of place in the book but tore 
the fabric of the whole design to pieces, and displayed in Beardsley a 
101 


. occa. Se al Seas Pere 


strain of inartistic mentality and vulgarity whereby he was prepared 
to sacrifice a remarkable achievement to a fit of stupid spleen and 
cheap conceit—for it was at once clear that he resented any attempt to 
prevent his offending the public sense of decency even though his 
supporters might suffer thereby. Now, whether the public were cant- 
ing or not, whether they were correct or not, Beardsley would not have 
been the chief sufferer by his committing flagrant indecencies in the 
public thoroughfare, and some of the drawings were deliberately in- 
decent. The public were canting in many ways; but they were also 
long-suffering, and Beardsley’s literary advisers were solely concerned 
with the young fellow’s interests. Besides vice has its cant as well as 
virtue. In any case, the mediocre Black Cape and the better Georgian 
Toilette, quite apart from their intrinsic merit in themselves as draw- 
ings, were an act of that utter bourgeois philistinism which the young 
fellow so greatly affected to despise, committed by himself alone. He 
who will thus fling stones at his own dignity has scant ground on 
which to complain of stone-throwing by the crowd. 
The interpolated Black Cape and the Second Toilette we may here 
dismiss as having nothing to do with the case; and what is more, they 
are wholly outside the Salome atmosphere. Of the pure Salome de- 
signs, incomparably the finest are The Stomach Dance and the Pea- 
cock Skirt. Yet, so faulty was Beardsley’s own taste at times, that he 
considered the best drawings to be The Man in the Moon, the Pea- 
cock Skirt, and The Dancer’s Reward—it should be noted by the way 
that Beardsley showed by his Book of Fifty Drawings that his title was 
The Man in the Moon not as the publishers have it, The Woman in 
the Moon. But it is in The Climax, one of the less noteworthy designs, 
that we discover Beardsley’s forward stride—for though the lower 
102 


1 
d 


“7% 


THE STOMACH DANCE 


from “Salome” 


wi el Ge, kes 4 C7 


half is so wretchedly done that it scarce seems to be by the same hand 
as the upper half, the purification of the line as compared with the 
fussy, fidgety futilities and meaninglessness of his flourishes and 
“hairy line” in the same subject, and practically of the same design, 
drawn but a year before and shown in The Studio first number, make 
us realise not only how rapidly he is advancing towards ease and 
clearness of handling, but it also makes us sympathise with the young 
fellow’s bitter distaste to carrying on a sequence of designs in a crafts- 
manship which he has utterly outgrown. 

We now come to the act for which Beardsley has been very severely 
censured. But it is rather a question whether the boot should not be 
on the other foot. It is not quite so simple a matter as it looks to the 
Jay mind for an artist to fulfil a long contract which at the time of his 
making it he enthusiastically cherishes and fully intends to carry out. 
A work of art is not a manufactured article that can be produced in- 
definitely to a pattern. It is natural that a business-man should blame 
Beardsley for shrinking from completing a large sequence of designs, 
covering a long artistic development, to illustrate a book. Yet it is 
only just to recognise that it fretted the young fellow that he could 
not do it, and that it requires a frantic and maddening effort of will 
in any artist to keep going back and employing an utterance that he 
has left behind him and rejected, having advanced to such a handling 
as The Neophyte. It is like asking a man to put the enthusiasm and 
intensity of a struggle for victory into an endeavour after he has won 
the victory. However let us consider the exact position. First of all, 
were the very low prices paid to Beardsley a living wage? 

Beardsley may have been more torn between his honour as a good 
citizen and his honour as a great artist than he was likely to have been 


105 


eee ee 


given the credit for having been; but he had to choose, willy-nilly, 
between his commercial honour and the fulfilling of his genius. A 
choice was compelled upon him, owing to the hardship that his pov- 
erty thrust upon him, in having accepted long contracts—or rather 
contracts that took time to fulfil. Before blaming Beardsley for not 
fulfilling his commercial obligations, it is only just to ask whether he 
could have fulfilled them even had he desired so to do. Was it pos- 
sible for him, passing swiftly into a rapid sequence of artistic devel- 
opments, to step back into a craftsmanship which he had outgrown 
as a game is restarted at the whistle of a referee? Once the voice of the 
youth breaks, can the deep accents of the man recover the treble of 
the boy? If not, then could the work of his new craftsmanship have 
been put alongside of the old without mutual antagonisms or hopeless 
incongruity? Could the Salome drawings for instance have appeared 
in the Morte d’ Arthur? But one thing is certain: Beardsley’s art and 
genius and his high achievement would have suffered—and Death 
was beckoning to him not to tarry. Either the commercial advantage 
of his publishers or the artistic achievement of his genius had to go. 
Which ought to go? Put it in another way: which is the greater good 
to the world, the achievement of genius or the fulfilment of the com- 
mercial contract of genius to the letter for the profit of the trade of 
one man? If instead of creating a great art, Beardsley had what is 
called “got religion” and gone forth to benefit mankind instead of 
completing his worldly duties by doing a given number of drawings 
for a book, would he deserve censure? Of the 544. or so decorations for 
the Morte d’Arthur, several are repeated—some more than once. Let 
us take 400 as a rough estimate, just for argument. Calculating 


106 


roughly that he made 400 drawings for the Morte d’ Arthur, did he 
get a living wage for them? Did he get a bare subsistence, say of a 
guinea a drawing? Supposing he got £100 for them, then he would 
be working at something like five shillings a drawing! Two hundred 
pounds would be ten shillings a drawing; £300 would be fifteen shil- 
lings. His bank-book alone can reveal to us what he earned. But sup- 
posing he did not get a living wage! The law will not permit an usurer 
to charge even a scapegrace waster more than a certain usury. If so, 
then it is not lawful or moral to contract with an artist to work for a 
beggar’s wage. We cannot judge Beardsley until we know the whole 
truth. The quality of mercy is not strained. His “‘pound of flesh” may 
be an abomination to demand. It is not enough to hold up self- 
righteous hands in protestation, Shylock-wise, that he refused to pay 
his pound of flesh. . . . 

Even before Beardsley was done with Salome, he had exhausted 
the Japanesque formula of line. The play completed, the feverish 
brain has to evolve a Title-page, a List of Contents, and a Finis; and 
we have seen him playing in a new key. Closing the book of Salome, 
weary of the Japanesque, having got from it all that it would yield his 
restless spirit, he turns away, and picking up the rich blacks of his 
Morte d’Arthur designs again, he was about to burst into a new song 
as hinted at by the last three designs for Salome. An artist is finding 
himself. Beardsley is on the threshold of a new utterance. 

About the end of October or early in the November of 1893, Beards- 
ley wrote to his old school that he had just signed a contract for a 
new book, to consist of his own drawings only, “without any letter- 
press,” which was probably a slight misunderstanding of what Beards- 


107 


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TITLE PAGE OF “‘SALOME”’ 


ley said: that he was to make drawings with no relation to the letter- 
press in a new venture about to appear. For The Yellow Book is the 
only contract that emerges out of this time. 

It is known that Henry Harland and Aubrey Beardsley were about 
this time, planning a magazine wherein to publish their wares; and 
that they took their scheme to John Lane. | 

Whilst at work on the Salome, Beardsley began the long series of 
decorative covers, with the fanciful “‘keys,”’ on the reverse back, form- 
ing the initials of the author of each volume, which Elkin Mathews 
and John Lane began to issue from The Bodley Head in Vigo Street 
as The Keynote Series of novels, published on the heels of the wide 
success of Keynotes by George Egerton in the midst of the feminist 
stir and the first notoriety of the ‘sex novel” of this time. 

And it was in 1893 that Beardsley was elected to the New English 
Art Club. 

Beardsley was beginning to feel his feet. His circle amongst artists 
and art-lovers was rapidly increasing. Suddenly a legacy to the brother 
and sister from their Aunt in Brighton, with whom they had lived after 
their own family came to London, decided the young fellow and his 
sister to set up house for themselves and to flit from the parental roof. 
About the end of the year, or the New Year of 1894, they bought their 
little home—a house in Pimlico at 114 Cambridge Street. 


110 


COVER DESIGN FOR “THE YELLOW BOOK” VOLUME III 


eva. 2 Stele toe. 


VII 
THE GREEK VASE PHASE 
New Year of 1894 to Mid-1895—Twenty-One to Twenty-Three 
“THE YELLOW BOOK’’ 


Ir was near the New Year of 1894 that Aubrey Beardsley and his 
sister Mabel Beardsley moved into the young fellow’s second Pimlico 
home in London, at 114 Cambridge Street, Warwick Square, which 
Vallance decorated for him with orange walls and black woodwork, 
with its much talked-of black and orange studio. How dull and stale 
it all sounds today! | 

Here Beardsley made his bid for a place in the social life of Lon- 
don. Every Thursday afternoon he and his sister, and generally his 
mother, were “At Home” to visitors. Beardsley, dressed with scrupu- 
lous care to be in the severest good taste and fashion, delighted to play 
the host—and an excellent host he was. All his charming qualities 
were seen at their best. The lanky, rather awkward, angular young 
man, pallid of countenance, stooped and meagre of body, with his 
“tortoise-shell coloured hair” worn in a smooth fringe over his white 
forehead, was the life and soul of his little gatherings. He paid for it 
with “a bad night” always when the guests were departed. 

Beardsley greatly liked his walls decorated with the stripes running 
from ceiling to floor in the manner he so much affects for the designs 
of his interiors such as the famous drawing of the lady standing at her 
dressing-table known as La Dame aux Camélias. The couch in his 


1 is: 


Se A 


studio bore sad evidence to the fact that he had to spend all too much 
of his all too short life lying upon it. 


When Beardsley began the Salome drawings at twenty-one he was, 
as we have seen, greatly interested in the erotic works of the J apanese 
masters; and this eroticism dominated his art quite as much as did 
the craftsmanship of the Japanese in line, whilst the lechery of his 
faces was distinctly suggested by the sombre, the macabre, and the 
grotesque features so much affected by the Japanese masters. Whilst 
at work upon the Salome designs he was much at the British Museum 
and was intensely drawn to the Greek vase-paintings in which the 
British Museum is very rich. Now not only did the austere artistry 
of the Greeks in their line and mass fascinate Beardsley—not only was 
he struck by the rhythm and range of mood, tragic, comic, and satir- 
ical, uttered by the Greeks, but here again was that factor in the Greek 
genius which appealed to Beardsley’s intense eroticism. The more 
obscene of the Greek vase-painters are naturally turned away from the 
public eye towards the wall, indeed some of them ’tis said, have been 
“purified” by prudish philistinism painting out certain ““naughti- 
nesses’; but it was precisely the skill with which the great Greek 
painters uttered erotic moods by the rhythmic use of line and mass 
that most keenly intrigued Beardsley. The violences of horrible lecher- 
ous old satyrs upon frail nymphs, painted by such Greek masters as 
Brygos and Duris, appealed to the morbid and grotesque mind and 
mood of Beardsley as they had tickled the Greeks aforetime. He had 
scarce finished his Salome drawings under the Japanese erotic influ- 
ence before the Greek satyr peeps in; Beardsley straightway flung 
114 


LA DAME AUX CAMELIAS 
from “The Yellow Book,” Volume III 


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away the Japanesque, left it behind him, and boldly entered into ri- 
valry with the Greeks. It was to make him famous. 


On the 15th of April 1894 appeared The Yellow Book. It made 
Beardsley notorious. 

In the February of 1894 Salome had been published cheek by jowl 
with the 3rd, the last, volume of Bon Mots; and Morte d’ Arthur was 
in full career. It is a common fallacy amongst writers to say that Sa- 
lome made Beardsley famous. Salome was an expensive book, pub- 
lished in a very limited edition. Except in a small but ever-increasing 
literary and artistic set, the Morte d’ Arthur and Salome passed quite 
unrecognised and unknown. But Salome did lead to an act which was 
to make Beardsley leap at a bound into the public eye. 

Elkin Mathews and John Lane were inspired with the idea of pub- 
lishing a handsome little quarterly, bound as a book, which should 
gather together the quite remarkable group of young writers and ar- 
tists that had arisen in London, akin to and in part largely created by 
the so-called Decadent group in Paris. This is not the place to describe 
or pursue the origins and rise of the French “Decadents.” The idea 
of The Yellow Book developed from a scheme of Beardsley’s who was 
rich in schemes and dreams rarely realised or even begun, whereby 
he was to make a book of drawings without any letterpress whatso- 
ever, of a sort of pictorial Comedy Ballet of Marionettes—to answer 
in the pictorial realm of Balzac’s Prose Comedy of life; but it does not 
seem to have fired a publisher. The Yellow Book quarterly, however, 
was a very different affair, bringing togeiher, as it did, the scattered 
_ art of the younger men. It inevitably drew into its orbit, as Beardsley 
dreaded it would, self-advertising mediocrities more than one. It was 


117 


decided to make Harland with his French literary sympathies the lit- 
erary editor, Beardsley to be the art editor. John Lane has borne wit- 
ness to the fact that one morning Beardsley with Henry Harland and 
himself, “during half an hour’s chat over our cigarettes at the Ho- 
garth Club, founded the much discussed Yellow Book.’ This 
quarterly, to be called The Yellow Book after the conventional name 
of a “yellow back” for a French novel, was to be a complete book in 
itself in each number—not only was it to be rid of the serial or se- 
quence idea of a magazine, but the art and the literature were to have 
no dependence the one on the other. 

Beardsley, feverishly as he had addressed himself to the Salome, 
as we have seen, had no sooner made the drawings than he wearied 
of them and sought for new worlds to conquer. It was about the New 
Year of 1894, the Salome off his hands, that The Yellow Book was 
planned in detail, and Beardsley flung himself into the scheme with 
renewed fiery ardour. The idea suited him better than any yet held 
out to him for the expression of his individual genius; and his hand’s 
craft was beginning to find personal expression. His mimicries and 
self-schooling were near at an end. He flung the Japanesques of the 
Salome into the wastepaper basket of his career with as fine a sigh of 
relief as he had aforetime flung aside the Morte d’ Arthur Kelmscott 
medievalism. And he now gave utterance to the life of the day as he 
saw it—through books—and he created a decorative craftsmanship 
wherewith to do it, compact of his intensely suggestive nervous and 
musical line in collusion with flat black masses, just as he saw that the 
Greeks had done—employing line and mass like treble and bass to 
each other’s fulfilment and enhancement. His apprenticeship to firm 
line and solid blacks in the Morte d’ Arthur now served him to splen- 

118 


re 
Se le 


did purpose. He was taking subjects that would tickle or exasperate 
the man-in-the-street, who was cold about the doings of the Court of 
Herod and indifferent to Japan and The Knights of the Round Table. 
Interested in the erotic side of social life, he naturally found his sub- 
jects in the half-world—he took the blatant side of “‘life’’ as it was 
lived under the flare of the electric lights of Piccadilly Circus, and the 
cafés thereabouts; its powdered and painted and patchouli “romance”’ 
amused him more than the solid and more healthy life of his day into 
which he had little insight, and for which he had rather a contempt as 
judged from his own set as being “middle-class” and unromantic. He 
scorned his own class. But he had the right as artist to utter any emo- 
tional experience whatsoever, the erotic as much as anything else— 
but we are coming to that. 

It was about this New Year of 1894 that the extraordinary German, 
Reichardt, who had made a huge success of his humorous and artistic 
weekly, Pick-Me-Up, in rivalry with Punch, planned the issue of a 
monthly magazine which had as its secret aim, if successful, that it 
should become a weekly illustrated paper to “smash the Graphic and 
Illustrated London News.” Struck by some article attacking the art 
critics written by me, he called me to the writing of the weekly review 
of Art Matters in this paper which was to be called St. Paul’s. Al- 
though at this time Beardsley was almost unknown to the general 
public, I suggested that the young artist should be given an opening 
for decorative work; and he was at once commissioned to make some 
drawings, to illustrate the Signs of the Zodiac—(remember, St. Paul’s 
was to begin as a monthly! )—and to illustrate the subjects to which 
each page was to be devoted such as Music, Art, Books, Fashions, The 
Drama, and the rest of it. He drew the “Man that holds the Water 

119 


Pot” and the “Music,” but the paper did not appear in January— 
indeed not until March. Beardsley then became bored, and fobbed 
off the paper with a couple of drawings that were probably meant for 
Dent’s Bon Mots—however they may have been intended for The 
Fashions and The Drama pages of St. Paul’s. He made in all four 
which were to be used as headings and tail pieces. They did not 
greatly encourage Reichardt, who shrugged his shoulders and said 
that I “might have the lot.”’ They have never reached me! They have 
this value, however, that they reveal Beardsley’s craftsmanship at the 
New Year of 1894—1they show him ridding himself of the “hairy 
line,”” with a marked increase of power over line—they end his Salome 
Japanesque phase. 

It is somewhat curious that, whilst The Man that holds the Water 
Pot is always printed awry in the collections of Beardsley’s works, the 
fourth drawing he made for St. Paul’s seems to have been missed by 
all iconographists, and I now probably possess the only known print 
of it! | 

Before we leave St. Paul’s, it is interesting to note that at this time 
the line and decorative power of Beardsley’s work were rivalled by 
the beauty, quality, richness, and decorative rhythm of the ornamental 
headings which Edgar Wilson was designing for St. Paul’s and other 
papers. 

It was in the March of 1894 that Beardsley drew the Poster for the 
Avenue Theatre which really brought him before a London public 
more than anything he had so far done—a success, be it confessed, 
more due to the wide interest aroused by the dramatic venture of the 
Avenue Theatre than to any inherent value in the Poster itself which 
could not be compared with the work of the Beggarstaff Brothers. 

120 


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MESSALINA 


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Needless to say that it was at this same time that George Bernard Shaw 
was to float into the public ken with his play of Arms and the Man 
at this same Avenue Theatre, hitherto so unlucky a play-house 
that from its situation on the Embankment under Charing Cross 
Bridge, it was cynically known to the wags as “The Home for Lost 
Seagulls.” I shall always associate Beardsley’s Avenue Theatre pos- 
ter with Shaw’s rise to fame as it recalls Shaw’s first night when, being 
called before the curtain at the end of Arms and the Man, some man 
amongst the gods booing loud and long amidst the cheering, Shaw’s 
ready Irish wit brought down the house as, gazing upwards into the 
darkness, his lank loose figure waited patiently until complete silence 
had fallen on the place, when he said dryly in his rich brogue: “I 
agree with that gentleman in the gallery, but”—shrugging his shoul- 
ders—*what are we amongst so many?” 

Beardsley’s decorations for John Davidson’s Plays appeared about 
the April of this year; but, needless to say, did not catch the interest 
of a wide public. 


Suddenly his hour struck for Aubrey Beardsley. 

It was the publication of The Yellow Book in the mid-April of 1894. 
that at once thrust Beardsley into the public eye and beyond the nar- 
row circle so far interested in him. 

London Society was intensely literary and artistic in its interests, 
or at any rate its pose, in the early ’nineties. Every lady’s drawing- 
room was sprinkled with the latest books—the well-to-do bought 
pictures and wrangled over art. The leaders of Society prided them- 
selves on their literary and artistic salons. As a snowfall turns London 
white in a night, so The Yellow Book littered the London drawing- 

L23 


rooms with gorgeous mustard as at the stroke of a magician’s wand. 
It “caught on.” And catching on, it carried Aubrey Beardsley on the 
crest of its wave of notoriety into a widespread and sudden vogue. 
After all, everything that was outstanding and remarkable about the 
book was Beardsley. The Yellow Book was soon the talk of the town, 
and Beardsley “awoke to find himself famous.”’ Punch promptly car- 
icatured his work; and soon he was himself caricatured by “Max” in 
the Pall Mall Budget; whilst the Oxford undergraduates were play- 
ing with Wierdsley Daubrey and the like. But it was left to Mostyn 
Piggott to write perhaps the finest burlesque on any poem in our 
tongue in the famous skit which ran somewhat thus: 


Twas rollog; and the minim potes 
Did mime and mimble in the cafe; 
All footly were the Philerotes 

And Daycadongs outstrafe . . . 


Beware the Yellow Bock, my son! 3 
The aims that rile, the art that racks, - 
Beware the Aub-Aub Bird, and shun .: 


The stumious Beerbomax! 
* * * * * * 


Then, as veep Vigo’s marge he trod, 
The Yallerbock, with tongue of blue, 
Came piffling through the Headley Bod, 
And flippered as it flew. . . . 


As one turns over the pages of The Yellow Book today, it is a little 
difficult to recall the sensation it made at its birth. Indeed, London’s 
124 


PAR LES DIEVX 
JVMEAVX TOVS 
LES MONSTRES 
NE SONT PAS EN 
AFRIQVE 


PORTRAIT OF HIMSELF 
from “The Yellow Book” Volume III 


Pa eee Fe 


passions and whims, grown stale, are fantastic weeds in the sear and 
yellow leaf. But it was a sensation. And that sensation flung wide the 
doors of Society to Aubrey Beardsley. He enjoyed his fame with gusto. 
He revelled in it. And the ineffable and offensive conceit that it en- 
gendered in the lad was very excusable and understandable. He was 
lionised on every hand. He appeared everywhere and enjoyed every 
ray of the sun that shone upon him. And the good fortune that his 
fairy godmother granted to him in all his endeavours, was enhanced 
by an increase of health and strength that promised recovery from 
the hideous threat that had dogged his sleeping and waking. His mu- 
sical childhood had taught him the value of publicity early—the 
whole of his youth had seen him pursuing it by every means and at 
every opportunity. When fame. came to him he was proud of it and 
loved to bask in its radiance. At times he questioned it; and sometimes 
he even felt a little ashamed of it—and of his Jackals. But his vogue 
now took him to the “domino room” of the Café Royal as a Somebody 
—and he gloried in the hectic splendour of not having to be explained. 

It was now roses, roses all the way for Aubrey Beardsley; yet even 
at the publishing of the second volume of The Yellow Book in July 
there was that which happened—had he had prophetic vision—that 
boded no good for the young fellow. 

The deed of partnership between Elkin Mathews and John Lane 
fell in, and Elkin Mathews withdrew from the firm, leaving John Lane 
in sole possession of The Bodley Head—and The Yellow Book. 

The parting of Elkin Mathews and John Lane seemed to bring to a 
head considerable feeling amongst the group of writers collected 
about The Bodley Head; this was to bear bitter fruit for Beardsley be- 
fore a twelvemonth was out. 


127 


It was on the designs of this second volume of The Yellow Book of 
July 1894 that Beardsley signed his “Japanesque mark” for the last 
time. Indeed these signed designs were probably done before June; 
for, in the Invitation Card for the Opening of the Prince’s Ladies Golf 
Club on Saturday June 16th 1894, the “Japanesque mark” has given 
place to “AUBREY BEARDSLEY.” 

Beardsley was to be seen everywhere. People wondered when he 
did his work. He flitted everywhere enjoying his every hour, as though 
he had no need to work—were above work. He liked to pose as one 
who did not need to work for a livelihood. As each number of the 
quarterly appeared, he won an increase of notoriety—or obloquy, 
which was much the same thing to Aubrey Beardsley; but as the win- 
ter came on, he was to have a dose of obloquy of a kind that he did 
not relish, indeed that scared him—and as a fact, it was most scan- 
dalously unfair gossip. Meanwhile the Christmas number of Today 
produced his very fine night-piece Les Passades. 

Oscar Wilde was at the height of his vogue—as playwright and wit 
and man of letters. Beardsley’s artistic share in the Salome, with its 
erotic atmosphere and its strange spirit of evil, gave the public a false 
impression that Beardsley and Wilde were intimates. They never were. 
Curiously enough, the young fellow was no particular admirer of 
Wilde’s art. And Wilde’s conceited remark that he had ‘‘invented 
Beardsley’ deeply offended the other. To cap it all, Beardsley de- 
lighted in the bohemian atmosphere and the rococo surrounding of 
what was known as the Domino Room at the Café Royal, and it so 
happened that Wilde had also elected to make the Café Royal his 
Court, where young talent was allowed to be brought into the presence 
and introduced. It came into the crass mind of one of Wilde’s satel- 


128 


NIGHT PIECE 


lites to go over to a table at which Beardsley was sitting, revelling in 
hero-worship, and to lead the young fellow into the presence, as 
Wilde had signified his condescension to that end—but the gross 
patronage of Wilde on the occasion wounded the young fellow’s con- 
ceit to the quick. It had flattered Beardsley to be seen with Wilde; 
but he never became an intimate—he never again sought to bask in 
the radiance. 

To add to Beardsley’s discomfort, there fell like bolt from the blue 
a novel called The Green Carnation of which Wilde and his associates 
were the obvious originals. The book left little to the imagination. 
The Marquis of Queensberry, owing to his son Lord Alfred Douglas’s 
intimacy with Wilde, was only too eager to strike Wilde down. Even 
if Queensberry had been inclined to hang back he could not very well 
in common decency have allowed the imputations of the book to pass 
by him without taking action. But he welcomed the scandal. He 
sprang at opportunity—and struck hard. With the reckless courage 
so characteristic of him, Queensberry took serious risks, but he struck 
—and he knew that the whole sporting world, of which he was a 
leader, would be behind him, as he knew full well that the whole of 
the healthy-minded majority of the nation would be solid in support 
of his vigorous effort to cut the canker out of society which was threat- 
ening public life under Wilde’s cynical gospel that the world had ar- 
rived at a state of elegant decay. 

Queensberry publicly denounced Wilde and committed acts which 
brought Wilde into public disrepute. There was nothing left to Wilde 
but to bring a charge of criminal libel against him or become a social 
pariah. On the 2nd of March 1895 Queensberry was arrested and 
charged at Marlbourgh Street; on the 9th he was committed for trial; 

131 


and on the 3rd of April he was tried at the Old Bailey amidst an ex- 
traordinary public excitement. He was acquitted on the 5th of April 
amidst the wild enthusiasm of the people. Oscar Wilde was arrested 
the same evening. | 

On the 6th of April, Wilde, with Taylor, was charged at Bow 
Street with a loathsome offence; public interest was at fever pitch 
during the fortnight that followed, when, on the 19th of April Wilde 
and Taylor were committed for trial, bail being refused. A week later, 
on the 26th, the trial of Wilde and Taylor began at the Old Bailey. 
After a case full of sensations, on the 1st of May, the jury disagreed 
and the prisoners were remanded for a fresh trial, bail being again 
refused. A week later, on the 7th of May, Wilde was released on bail 
for £5,000; and it was decided to try the two men separately. Taylor 
was put on trial at the Old Bailey for the second time, alone, on May 
the 20th, and the next day was found “guilty,” sentence being post- 
poned. The following day, the 22nd, the second trial of Wilde began 
at the Old Bailey, and on the 25th of May he also was found “guilty,” 
and with Taylor was sentenced to two years mate with hard 
labour. : 

The popular excitement over this trial of Wilde reached fever heat. 
The fall of Wilde shook society; and gossip charged many men of 
mark with like vices. Scandal wagged a reckless tongue. A very gen- 
eral scare set in, which had a healthy effect in many directions; but 
it also caused a vast timidity in places where blatant EUS) had a 
short while before been in truculent vogue. . . . 

John Lane, now at The Bodley Head alone, had publinel volume 
Ill of The Yellow Book in October 1894 and volume IV in the Jan- 
uary of 1895. Beardsley had made the drawings for the April number, 

132 


volume V; the blocks were also made, and a copy or so of the number 
bound, when, at the beginning of March, Queensberry’s arrest shook 
society. The public misapprehension about Beardsley being a friend 
of Oscar Wilde’s probably caused some consternation amongst the 
writers of The Yellow Book; but whatever the cause, John Lane who 
was in America was suddenly faced with an ultimatum—it was said 
that one of his chief poets put the pistol to his head and threatened 
that without further ado either he or Beardsley must leave The Yellow 
Book at once. Now this cable announced that William Watson was not 
alone but had the alliance of Alice Meynell, then at the height of her 
vogue, with others most prominent in this movement. Into the merits 
of the storm in the teacup we need not here go. What decided John 
Lane in his awkward plight to sacrifice Beardsley rather than the poet 
was a personal matter, solely for John Lane to decide as suited his own 
business interest best. He decided to jettison Beardsley. The decision 
could have had little to do with anything objectionable in Beardsley’s 
drawings, for a copy was bound with Beardsley’s designs complete, 


and anything more innocent of offence it would be difficult to imagine. 


It may therefore be safely assumed that the revolt on John Lane’s ship 
was solely due to the panic set up by the Wilde trial, resulting in a 
most unjust prejudice against Beardsley as being in some way sym- 
pathetic in moral with the abhorred thing. No man knows such gusts 
of moral cowardice as the moralist. However, in expelling Beardsley 
The Yellow Book was doomed—it at once declined, and though it 
struggled on, it went to annihilation and foundered. 

This ultimatum by cable to John Lane in America was a piece of 
cant that Lane felt as bitterly as the victim Beardsley. It grieved John 
Lane to his dying day, and he blamed himself for lack of courage in 

Lies 


i a: 


deserting the young fellow; but he was hustled, and he feared that it 
might wreck the publishing house which he had built up at such in- 
finite pains. Above all he knew that Beardsley would never forgive 
him. But Lane blamed himself quite needlessly, as in all this ugly 
incident, in that he had shown lack of personal dignity in allowing 
himself to be thrust aside from captaincy of his own ship whilst he had 
been made responsible for the act of his mutineers which he had 
whole-heartedly detested. Lane would not be comforted. He never 
ceased to blame himself. 

His expulsion from The Yellow Book was very bitterly resented by 
Beardsley. It hurt his pride and it humiliated him at the height of his 
triumph. And he writhed at the injustice inflicted upon him by the 
time selected to strike at him, besmirching him as it did with an asso- 
ciation of which he was wholly innocent. And it must be confessed 
that The Yellow Book at once became a stale farce played by all con- 
cerned except the hero, from the leading lady to the scene-shifter— 
Hamlet being attempted without the Prince of Denmark. 

The trial and conviction of Oscar Wilde shook the young fellow 
even more thoroughly. Quite apart from the fierce feeling of resent- 
ment at the injustice of his being publicly made to suffer as though an 
intimate of a man in disgrace for whom he had no particular liking, 
Beardsley realised that his own flippant and cheaply cynical attitude 
towards society might, like Wilde’s, have to be paid for at a hideous 
price. The whole ugly business filled him with disgust; and what at 
least was to the good, the example of Wilde’s crass conceit humbled 
in the dust, knocked much of the cheap conceit out of Beardsley, to 
his very great advantage, for it allowed freer play to that considerable 
personal charm that he possessed in no small degree. 


134 


ee tae tee errr pent egmoreiescoee-nese 


sine aaah 


ee a aA ENED NEARS SEB BIC lures coeaich lawn ie ein pages is 


AIT OF MRS. PATRICK CAMPBELL 


PORTR 


“The Yellow Book,” Volume I 


from 


i earn oe 


His expulsion from The Yellow Book placed Beardsley in a very 
awkward financial position. The income that he derived from his 
drawings for The Yellow Book must have been but small at best; and 
it is a mystery how he lived. It has been said that he found generous 
patrons, and that of these not the least generous was one André Raf- 
falovich, a man of wealth. But the sources of his means of livelihood 
must have been dangerously staunched by his expulsion from The 
Yellow Book. 

The strange part of Beardsley’s career is that the designs for vol- 
ume V of The Yellow Book, printed for April, but suppressed at the 
last moment, ended his achievement in this phase and style and crafts- 
manship. When the blow fell, he was already embarking upon a new 
craftsmanship ; indeed towards this development he markedly moves 
in the later Yellow Book designs. Had Beardsley died in mid-1895, 
at twenty-three, he would have left behind him the achievement of an 
interesting artist; but not a single example of the genius that was 
about to astonish the world. 


The Yellow Book phase of Beardsley’s art is very distinct from what 
went before and what was to come after. There are two types: a fine 
firm line employed with flat black masses of which the famous Lady 
Gold’s Escort and The Wagnerites are the type, and of which The 
Nightpiece is the triumph—and a very thin delicate line, generally 
for portraiture, to define faintly the body to a more firmly drawn head 
—of which the Mrs. Patrick Campbell is the type and L’Education 
sentimentale a variant—whilst the three remarkable Comedy-Ballets 
of Marionettes I, II, and III, show white masses used against black. 

Beardsley employed his “Japanesque mark”’ for the last time in 

137 


mid-1894 in the July volume, No. 2, of The Yellow Book. The Plays 
of John Davidson, several Madame Réjanes, the fine Les Passades, 
the Scarlet Pastorale, and the Tales of Mystery and Wonder by Edgar 
Allan Poe, are all of the early 1894. Yellow Book phase. 

But in the third volume of The Yellow Book, the fanciful and de- 


lightful portrait of The Artist in bed, “Par les dieux jumeaux tous les 
monstres ne sont pas en Afrique,” and the famous La Dame aux Camé- 
lias standing before her dressing table, advance his handling in free- 
dom and rhythm; as does the exquisite The Mysterious Rose Gar- 
den, which Beardsley described as “the first of a series of Biblical 
illustrations, and represents nothing more nor less than the Annun- 
ciation” —indeed he could not understand the objections of the prud- 
ish to it and resented its being misunderstood! The Messalina with 
her Companion is of this later Yellow Book phase; and the Atalanta 
without the hound of the suppressed Fifth Volume is a fine example 
of it. 

The beautifully wrought Pierrot Invitation Card for John Lane; 
the remarkable wash drawings A Nocturne of Chopin from the sup- 
pressed Volume Five, and the Chopin, Ballade III Op. 47 of The 
Studio, all drawn on the eve of his expulsion from The Yellow Book, 
show Beardsley advancing with giant strides when the blow fell; and 
in the double-page Juvenal of the monkey-porters carrying the Sedan- 
chair, he foreshadows his new design. But the surest test of the change, 
as well as the date of that change, is revealed by an incident that fol- 
lowed Beardsley’s expulsion from The Yellow Book: for, being com- 
missioned to design a frontispiece by Elkin Mathews for An Evil 
Motherhood, Beardsley promptly sent the rejected Black Cape, of the 
suppressed Fifth Volume, direct to the printers; and it was only un- 


138 


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“4 
a 


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ROSE GARDEN 


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MYSTERIO 


THE 


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olume IV 


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ellow Book” 


eLhey 


from 


der the dogged refusal of Elkin Mathews to produce it that Beardsley 
made the now famous design of the Evil Motherhood in which he en- 
tirely breaks from The Yellow Book convention and craftsmanship, 
and launches into the craftsmanship of his Great Period. 

It was about the time of Beardsley’s expulsion from The Yellow 
Book that trouble arose in America over the piracy of one of Beard- 
sley’s Posters for Fisher Unwin, the publisher. Beardsley had made a 
mediocre poster for The Pseudonym Library, a woman in a street 
opposite a book shop; but followed it with the finest Poster he ever 
designed—a lady reading, seated in a “‘groaning-chair,” a scheme in 


black and purple, for Christmas Books—all three of The Yellow Book 
phase. 


There happened at this time soon after his expulsion from The 
Yellow Book, in mid-1895, a rather significant incident in young 
Beardsley’s life—an incident that dragged me into its comedy, and 
was to have a curious and dramatic sequel before three years were 
passed by. 

I had only as yet met Beardsley once. But it so happened by chance 
—and it was a regret to me that it so chanced—it fell to my lot to 
have to criticise an attack on modern British art in the early summer, 
and in the doing to wound Beardsley without realising it. He had 
asked for it, *tis true—had clamoured for it—and yet resented others 
saying what he was arrogant in doing. . . . One of those stupid, 
narrow-vision’d campaigns against modern art that break out with 
self-sufficient philistinism, fortified by self-righteousness, amongst 
academic and conventional writers, like measles in a girls’ school, was 


14] 


in full career; and a fatuous and utterly unjust attack, led by Harry 
Quilter, if I remember rightly, leaping at the Oscar Wilde scandal for 
its happy opportunity, poured out its ridiculous moralities and charges 
against modern British art and literature over the pages of one of the 
great magazines, as though Wilde and Beardsley were England. It 
will be noted that with crafty skill the name of Beardsley was coupled 
with that of Wilde—I see the trick of “morality” now; I did not see 
it at the time. I answered the diatribe in an article entitled The Decay 
of English Art, in the June of 1895, in which it was pointed out that 
it was ridiculous, as it was vicious, to take Oscar Wilde in literature 
and Aubrey Beardsley in art as the supreme examples and typical ex- 
amples of the British genius when Swinburne and young Rudyard 
Kipling and Shaw, to mention a few authors alone, Sidney Sime and 
the Beggarstaff Brothers and young Frank Brangwyn, to mention but 
two or three artists at random, with Phil May, were in the full tide of 
their achievement. Indeed, the point dwelt upon was that neither 
Wilde nor Beardsley, so far from being the supreme national genius, 
was particularly “‘national” in his art. Young Beardsley, remarkable 
as was his promise, had not as yet burst into full song, and in so far as 
he had given forth his art up to that time, he was born out of the 
Aesthetes (Burne-Jones and Morris) who, like the Pre-Raphaelites 
who bred them (Rossetti), were not national at all but had aped a 
foreign tongue, speaking broken English with an Italian accent, and 
had tried to see life through borrowed spectacles in frank and vaunted 
mimicry of medizval vision. In going over Wilde’s and Beardsley’s 
claims to represent the British genius, I spoke of the art of both men 
as “having no manhood” and being “effeminate,” “sexless and un- 


142 


Secs er a 


| 


DESIGN FOR AN INVITATION CARD 


my | 
j 


Ne vee? ee eee eT Oe ee ee eee eal 


clean’”’—which was not at all typical of the modern achievement as a 
whole, but only of a coterie, if a very brilliantly led coterie, of mere 
precious poetasters. 

Beardsley, I afterwards heard, egged on to it by the jackals about 
him, cudgelled his brains to try and write a withering Whistlerian re- 
ply; and after some days of cudgelling was vastly pleased with a labo- 
riously hatched inspiration. It was a cherished and carefully nurtured 
ambition of the young fellow to rival Whistler in withering brevities to 
the Press. He wrote a letter to the editor of St. Paul’s; and the editor, 
Reichardt, promptly sent it on to me, asking if I had any objection to 
its being printed. The letter began clumsily and ungrammatically, but 
contained at the end a couple of quite smartly witty lines. It ran thus: 


114 Cambridge Street 
5. W. 
June 28th 
Sir, No one more than myself welcomes frank, nay, hostile criticism, or en- 
joys more thoroughly a personal remark. But your art critic surely goes a 
little too far in last week’s issue of St. Paul’s, & I may be forgiven if I take 
up the pen of resentment. He says that I am “sexless and unclean.” 
As to my uncleanliness I do the best for it in my morning bath, & if he 
has really any doubts as to my sex, he may come and see me take it. 
Yours &c 
Aubrey Beardsley 


This letter was read and shown to Beardsley’s circle amidst ecstatic 
delight and shrill laughter, and at last despatched. 
I wrote to Reichardt that of course Beardsley had every right to 
145 


answer my criticisms, but that I should expect my reply to be pub- 
lished—that I quite: understood Beardsley’s business astuteness in 
seeking self-advertisement—but I was the last man in the world to 
allow any man to make a fool of me in print even to add stature to 
Beardsley’s inches. But I suggested that as Beardsley seemed rather 
raw at literary expression, and as I hated to take advantage of a clown 
before he had lost his milk teeth, I would give him back his sword and 
first let him polish the rust off it; advised him, if he desired to pose as 
a literary wit, that he obliterate mistakes in grammar by cutting out 
the whole of the clumsy beginning, and simply begin with “Your 
critic says I am sexless and unclean,” and then straight to his naughty 
but witty last sentence. I begged therewith to forward my reply at the 
same time, as follows: 


A Public Apology to Mr. Aubrey Beardsley. 
Sir, 

When a cockrel sits overlong upon the egg of the spontaneous repartee, 
his labour runs risk of betraying the strain to which he has put his untried 
skill in giving birth to gossamer or bringing forth the airy bladder of the 
scathing retort. To ape Whistler does not disprove descent from the 
monkeys. But since Mr. Beardsley displays anxiety to establish his sex, pray 
assure him that I eagerly accept his personal confession. Nor am I 
overwhelmed with his rollicking devilry in taking his morning bath— 
a pretty habit that will soon lose its startling thrill of novelty if he persist 
in it. 

Yours truly 


Hal Dane. 
July 3rd 1895 


The young fellow, on receipt of all this, awoke with a start to the 
146 


fact that the sword is a dangerous weapon wherewith to carve a way 
to advertisement—the other fellow may whip from the scabbard as 
deadly a weapon for wounds. | 

Beardsley seems to have rushed off to Reichardt—before giving 
out my answer to the jackals who had shrieked over Beardsley’s “‘mas- 
terpiece”—on receipt of my letter and, fearful lest he might be too 
late, the young fellow anxiously pleaded that he might be allowed to 
withdraw his letter. Reichardt replied that it must depend on me. I 
then wrote to Reichardt that of course I had suspected that Beardsley’s 
childish assurance that “no one more than himself enjoys more thor- 
oughly a personal remark” was a smile on the wry side of his mouth; 
but that I ought to confess that it had not been any intention of mine 
to lash at him but at Harry Quilter—at the same time perhaps he 
would not take it amiss from me, since I was no prude, that I thought 
It a pity that Beardsley should fritter his exquisite gifts to the ap- 
plause of questionable jackals and the hee-haw of parasites, when he 
should be giving all his powers to a high achievement such as it would 
be a source of artistic pride for him to look back upon in the years to 
come. It is only fair to add that from that moment, Beardsley trusted 
me, and that his works as they were about to be published were sent 
to me in advance for criticism. What is more, in writing to Reichardt 
about Beardsley, I had strongly urged the young fellow to rid his sig- 
nature of the wretched “rustic lettering” he affected, and to employ 
plain block letters as being in keeping with the beauty of his line and 
design; and to show how free he was from resenting sincere advice, 
from this time, greatly to the enhancement of his design, Beardsley 
used plain block lettering for his signature. Reichardt told me that 
tears came into the young fellow’s eyes when he read out to him a 


147 


passage in my letter in which I had told him that, at a gathering at 
Leighton’s house, Phil May had asked the President of the Royal 
Academy whether he thought that Hal Dane had not put it rather ex- 
travagantly when he wrote that Beardsley was one of the supreme 
masters of line who had ever lived; to which Leighton had solemnly 
replied, before a group that was anything but friendly to Beardsley’s 
work, that he thoroughly agreed. It was a particular gratification to 
me that this little more than a lad was informed of Leighton’s appre- 
ciation whilst Leighton lived; for the President, a very great master 
of line himself, died about the following New Year. Phil May with 
precisely the same aim of craftsmanship in economy of line and the 
use of the line to utter the containing form in its simplest perfection, 
whilst he greatly admired the decorative employment of line and mass 
by Beardsley, considered Beardsley quite incapable of expressing his 
own age. Phil May was as masterly a draughtsman as Beardsley was 
an indifferent draughtsman; but both men could make line “sing.” 

In a brief three years, young Aubrey Beardsley was to lie a-dying: 
and as he so lay he wrote a letter to his publisher which is its own sig- 
nificant pathetic confession to this appeal that I made to him before 
it should be too late, little as one then realised how near the day of 
bitter regret was at hand. 


Beardsley during his early Yellow Book phase, about the July of 

1894 or a month or so afterwards, made his first essay in painting 

with oils. He had, in June or earlier, drawn the three designs for The 

Comedy Ballet of Marionettes which appeared in the July Yellow 

Book; he now bought canvas and paints and painted, with slight 

changes, The Comedy Ballet No. I, in William Nicholson’s manner. 
148 


‘= 


THE SCARLET PASTORALE 


He evidently tired of the problems of the medium, or he was tired of 
the picture; and, turning the canvas about, he painted a Lady with a 
Mouse on the unprimed back, between the stretchers, in the Walter 
Sickert style. “I have no great care for colour,” he said—“‘I only use 
flat tints, and work as if I were colouring a map, the effect aimed at 
being that produced on a Japanase print.” “I prefer to draw every- 
thing in little.” 

It i8 as likely as not that his attempt to paint The Comedy Ballet I 
in oils may have had something to do with its use as an advertisement 
for Geraudel’s Pastilles—as well as I can remember—which first ap- 
peared in Le Courier Francais on February 17th, 1895. It was a won- 
derful decade for the poster, and this French firm offered handsome 
prizes and prices for a good artistic one; though, as a matter of fact, 
Beardsley’s posters were quite outclassed by those of far greater men 
in that realm—Cheret, the Beggarstaff Brothers, Steinlen, Lautrec, 
and others. Beardsley’s genius, as he himself knew full well, was es- 
sentially “in the small.” 

For some unfortunate reason, but probably with good-natured in- 
tention of preventing Beardsley from suffering discredit at his dis- 
missal from The Yellow Book, John Lane whilst in America during 
the summer started a well-meaning but quite fatuous theory, much 
resented by Beardsley, that the young fellow, so far from being the 
flower of decadence, was “‘a pitiless satirist who will crush it out of 
existence. . . . He is the modern Hogarth; look at his Lady Gold’s 
Escort and his Wagnerites. . . . The decadent fad can’t long stand 
such satire as that. It has got to go down before it.”” Scant wonder that 
the Daily Chronicle asked dryly: “Now, why was Mr. Lane chaffing 
that innocent interviewer?” This apology for his art bitterly offended 

151 


Beardsley, who knew it to be utterly untrue, but who still more re- 
sented this desire to show him as being really “quite respectable.” 
As a matter of fact, Beardsley had nothing of the satirist in him; had 
he wanted to satirise anything he would have satirised the respect- 
abilities of the middle-class which he detested, not the musicians and 
the rich whom he adored and would have excused of any sin. Look 
through the achievement of Beardsley and try to fling together a dozen 
designs that could be made to pass for satire of the vices of his age! 
It became a sort of cant amongst certain writers to try and whitewash 
Beardsley by acclaiming him a satirist—he was none. A dying satirist 
does not try to recall his “obscene drawings.” 


At a loose end, on his expulsion from The Yellow Book, Beardsley 
drifted somewhat. He now turned his attention to a literary career, 
and began to write an erotic novel which he meditated calling Venus 
and Tannhduser—it was to emerge later in a much mutilated state as 
Under the Hill—a sly jest for Under the Venusburg or Mons Veneris. 
He completely put behind him the Greek vase-painting phase of his 
drawings for The Yellow Book, and developed a new craftsmanship 
which was to create his great style and supreme achievement in art. 

The smallness of the page of The Yellow Book had galled him by 
compelling upon him a very trying reduction of his designs to the size 
of the plate on the printed page; the reduction had always fretted 
him it was become an irk. It compelled him largely to keep to the line 
and flat black masses of his Greek Vase phase longer than his interest 
was kept alive by that craftsmanship. His developments were uncan- 
nily rapid as though he knew he had but a short way to go. 

Baron Verdigris was the transition from the Morte d’ Arthur phase 

152 


ATALANTA 


to the Yellow Book or Greek Vase phase; the Mrs. Whistler as The 
Fat Woman was the transition from his Greek vase stage; Black Coffee 
the end of the Greek Vase stage. Rid of the cramping limitations of 
The Yellow Book page and its consequent disheartening reduction, 
Beardsley was now to develop a freer use of his line and reveal a 
greater love of detail employed with a realistic decorative beauty all 
his own. 

He was still living in his house in Pimlico at 114. Cambridge Street, 
with his sister, when expelled from The Yellow Book. It was about this 
time that he met the poet John Gray who had been in the decadent 
movement and became a Roman Catholic priest—the friendship soon 
became more close and ripened into a warm brotherly affection. It was 
to have a most important effect on Beardsley’s life. Gray published 
Beardsley’s letters, which begin with their early acquaintance, and 
were soon very frequent and regular; these letters give us a clear inti- 
mate insight into Beardsley’s spiritual life and development from this 
time. Beardsley begins by calling him affectionately ‘““My dear Men- 
tor,” from which and from the letters we soon realise that Gray was 
from the first bent on turning the young fellow’s thoughts and tastes 
and artistic temperament towards entering the Roman Catholic 
Church. Indeed, soon we find Gray priming the young fellow with 
arguments to refute his “‘Anglican” friends. 


The bout of renewed health that had come to cheer Beardsley with 
The Yellow Book, lasted only to the fall of the yellow leaf. Ill health 
began again to dog his footsteps; and it was an astonishing tribute to 
his innate vitality that he could keep so smiling a face upon it. 
Whether the little house in Pimlico were sold over his head, or 


155 


whether from disheartenment of ill-health, or his expulsion from The 
Yellow Book and all that it implied, in the July of 1895 the house at 
114. Cambridge Street was sold, and Beardsley removed to 10 and 11 
St. James’s Place, S. W. It was all rather suddenly decided upon. 

He was by this time not only drifting back to bad health; but was 
so ill that those who saw him took him for a dying man. 

And The Yellow Book went on without him, to die a long lingering 
ignoble death. 


Drifting, rudderless; the certainty of a living wage from The Bodley 
Head gone wholly from him; hounded again by the fell disease that 
shook his frail body, Beardsley’s wonderful creative force drove him 
to the making of a drawing which was shown to me in this early sum- 
mer of 1895—and I awoke to the fact that a creative genius of the 
first rank in his realm had found himself and was about to give forth 
an original art of astounding power. It was the proof of the Venus be- 
tween Terminal Gods. A little while later was to be seen the exquisite 
Mirror of Love, wrought just before the Venus between Terminal 
Gods. A new era had dawned for Aubrey Beardsley amidst the black 
gloom of his bitter sufferings and as bitter humiliation. 


156 


TITLE-PAGE FROM “THE SAVOY” NOS. 1 AND 2 


VIll 
THE GREAT PERIOD 


Mid-1895 to Yuletide 1896—Twenty-Three to Twenty-Four 


““THE SAVOY’’ AND THE AQUATINTESQUES 


Toe THE SAVOY” 


IT was in a state of drift, of uncertainty as to the future and even the 
present, that Aubrey Beardsley, after a year of brilliant good fortune, 
thus suddenly found himself rudderless and at sea. That fickle and 
heartless arty public that fawned upon him and fought for his smile, 
that prided itself on “discovering” him and approving his art, these 
were the last folk in the world to trouble their heads or put hand in 
pocket in order that he might live and be free to achieve his art. The 
greater public was inimical and little likely to show sympathy, far less 
to help. | 

But even as he drifted, uncertain whether to pursue his art or to 
venture into literature instead, there stepped out of the void a man 
who was to make Beardsley’s path straight and his wayfaring easy. 
For, at the very moment of his perplexities, on his twenty-third birth- 
day, Aubrey Beardsley was on the eve of his supreme achievement. 


In the summer of 1895, Arthur Symons, the poet and essayist, 
sought out Beardsley in his London rooms on a mission from as strange 
a providence as could have entered into Beardsley’s destiny—a man 


159 


who proposed to found a new magazine, with Arthur Symons as lit- 
erary editor and Beardsley as art editor. The mere choice of editors re- 
vealed this fellow’s consummate flair. His name was Leonard 
Smithers; and it was to this dandified fantastic adventurer that 
Beardsley was wholly to owe the great opportunity of his life to 
achieve his supreme master-work. Had it not been for Smithers it is 
absolutely certain that Aubrey Beardsley would have died with the 
full song that was within him unsung. 

Arthur Symons has told us of his mission and of his finding Beard- 
sley lying on a couch—“horribly white, I wondered if I had come too 
late.” Beardsley was supposed to be: dying. But the idea of this rival 
to The Yellow Book which had at once begun to feel the cold draught 
of the fickle public’s neglect on the departure of Beardsley, appealed 
hugely to the afflicted man, and he was soon eagerly planning the 
scheme for its construction with Arthur Symons. No more ideal part- 
ner for Beardsley in the new venture could have been found than 
Arthur Symons. A thoroughly loyal man, a man of fine fibre in letters, 
he had far more than the ordinary cultured literary man’s feeling for 
pictorial art. The two men had also a common bond in their contempt 
of Mrs. Grundy and in their keen interest in the erotic emotions— 
Arthur Symons had not hesitated to besmirch the sweet name of Juliet 
by writing of a “Juliet of a Night.” 

Beardsley there and then suggested the happy name of The Savoy 
for the magazine; and he quickly won over Symons to the idea, so 
vital to Beardsley’s work, of making the page a quarto size in order 
to enable his work to be produced on a larger scale. 

The scheme brought back energy and enthusiasm to Beardsley, and 
he was soon feverishly at work to surpass all his former achievement. 


- 160 


FRONTISPIECE FOR “VENUS AND TANNHAUSER” 


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What was perhaps of far more value to Beardsley in the pursuit of his 
art, even than the new outlet to a large public, was the offer of his pub- 
lisher, Smithers, to finance Beardsley in return for all work whatso- 
ever from his hands becoming thenceforth the sole copyright of 
Smithers. This exclusive contract with Smithers we are about to see 
working to Beardsley’s great advantage and peace of mind. It made 
him a free man. 

The exclusive right to all Beardsley’s drawings from this time gives 
us a clue to the fact that between the sudden expulsion from The 
Yellow Book in the April of 1895 to the beginning of his work for 
Smithers, he, in his state of drift, created amongst other things two 
drawings of rare distinction, masterpieces which at once thrust him 
into the foremost rank of creative artists of his age—these drawings, 
clearly of mid-1895, since they did not belong to John Lane on the 
one hand, nor to Smithers on the other, were the masterly Venus be- 
tween Terminal Gods, designed for his novel of Venus and Tann- 
hauser, better known as Under the Hill, and the exquisite Mirror of 
Love, or as it was also called Love Enshrined in a Heart in the shape 
of a Mirror. In both drawings Beardsley breaks away from his past 
and utters a clear song, rid of all mimicry whatsoever. His hand’s 
skill is now absolutely the servant to his art’s desire. He plays with the 
different instruments of the pen line as though a skilled musician 
drew subtle harmonies from a violin. His mastery of arrangement, 
rhythm, orchestration, is all unhesitating, pure, and musical. These 
two masterpieces affect the sense of vision as music affects the sense 

of sound. Beardsley steps into his kingdom. 
The man who opened the gates to Beardsley’s supreme genius was 
a fantastical usher to immortality. Leonard Smithers was a mysterious 


163 


figure about whom myths early began to take shape. He was reputed 
to be an “unfrocked”’ attorney from Leeds. Whether an attorney from 
the north, frocked or unfrocked, or if unfrocked, for what unfrocked, 
gossip whispered and pursed the lip—but gave no clue. He came to 
London to adventure into books with an unerring flair for literature 
and for art. We have but a tangle of gossip from which to write the 
life of such a man. The tale went as to how he came to London and set 
up as a second-hand bookseller in a little slip of a shop, its narrow 
shelves sparsely sprinkled with a few second-hand books of question- 
able morality—a glass door, with a drab muslin peep-blind at the 
end, led into a narrow den from the dingy recess of which his lean 
and pale and unhealthy young henchman came forth to barter with 
such rare customers as wandered into the shop; of how, one evening, 
there drifted into the shop a vague man with a complete set of Dickens 
in the original paper covers; and of how, Smithers, after due deprecia- 
tion of it, bought it for a few sovereigns; and how—whilst the hench- 
man held the absent-minded seller in converse—Smithers slipped out 
and resold it for several hundred pounds—and how, the book being 
bought and the vague-witted seller departed, the shutters were hastily 
put up for the night; and of how Smithers, locking the muslin- 
curtained door, emptied out the glittering sovereigns upon the table 
before his henchman’s astonished eyes, and of how he and the pallid 
youth bathed their hair in showers of gold. . . . Smithers soon 
therefore made his daring coup with Burton’s unexpurgated Arabian 
Nights, which was to be the foundation of Smithers’s fortune. The gos- 
sip ran that, choosing Friday afternoon, so that a cheque written by 
him could not reach a London bank before the morning of Monday, 
Smithers ran down to the country to see Lady Burton; and after much 

164 


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persuasion, and making it clear to her that the huge industry and 
scholarship of the great work would otherwise be utterly wasted, as it 
was quite unsaleable to an ordinary publisher, but would have to be 
privately issued, he induced her to sell Burton’s scrip for a couple of 
thousand pounds. Skilfully delaying the writing of the cheque for a 
sum which his account at the bank could not possibly meet, Smithers 
waited until it was impossible for the local post to reach London be- 
fore the banks closed on Saturday morning—returned to town with 
the scrip—and spent the rest of the evening and the whole of Satur- 
day in a vain and ever-increasing frantic endeavour to sell the famous 
manuscript for some seven or eight thousand pounds or so. It was 
only by dogged endeavour on the Sunday that he at last ran down his 
forlorn hope and sold it for—it is gossiped—some five thousand 
pounds. On the Monday morning the bank-porter, on opening the 
doors of the bank, found sitting on the doorstep a dandified figure of 
a man in silk hat and frock coat, with a monocle in his anxious, whim- 
sical eye. . . . So Smithers paid the money into his account to meet 
the cheque which he had drawn and dated for this Monday, before the 
manager was likely to have opened his morning correspondence. It 
had been touch and go. 

Smithers now ventured into the lucrative but dangerous field of 
fine editions of forbidden or questionable books of eroticism. Thus it 
came about that when John Lane sent Beardsley adrift into space, 
Smithers with astute judgment seized upon the vogue that Lane had 
cast from him, and straightway decided to launch a rival quarterly 
wherewith to usurp The Yellow Book. He knew that young Beardsley, 
bitterly humiliated, would leap at the opportunity. And with his re- 
markable flair for literature and art, Smithers brought Arthur Symons 

167 


and Aubrey Beardsley into his venture. Leonard Smithers did more— 
or at any rate so I had it from himself later, though Smithers was not 
above an “exaggeration” to his own advantage—Beardsley’s bank- 
books alone can verify or refute it—he intended and meant to see to 
it that, Beardsley from that hour should be a free man, free from cares 
of bread, free from suppressing his genius to suit the marketplace, 
free to utter what song was in him. Whether Smithers were the un- 
scrupulous rogue that he was painted by many or not, he determined 
that from thenceforth Beardsley should be assured of a sound income 
whether he, Smithers, had to beg, borrow, or steal, or jockey others, 
in order that Beardsley should have it. This dissipated-looking man, 
in whatsoever way he won his means, was at this time always well 
dressed and had every appearance of being well-to-do. He had his ups 
and downs; but he made a show of wealth and success. And he kept 
his wilful bond in his wilful way. Whosoever went a-begging for it, 
Smithers raised the money by fair means or foul that Beardsley might 
fulfil himself, for good or for ill. He knew no scruple that stood in 
Beardsley’s way. It is true that when Beardsley died, Smithers ex- 
ploited him; but whilst he lived, Smithers was the most loyal and de- 
voted friend he had. 

A word-portrait of this man, drawn in the pages of a weekly paper, 
M. A. P., a couple of years after Beardsley’s death, shows him as he 
appeared to the public of his day. Smithers had left the Royal Arcade 
and blossomed out into offices in King’s Street, Covent Garden; as 
town house a large mansion near the British Museum; and a “place 
in the country”; “A publisher of books, although he is generally a 
subject of veneration, is not often possessed of a picturesque and in- 
teresting personality. Mr. Leonard Smithers is a notable exception to 

168 


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the unromantic rule. Few people who know him have failed to come 
under the spell of his wit and charm. In King Street, Covent Garden, 
Mr. Smithers has his office, and receives his guests in a great room 
painted green, and full of quietness and comfortable chairs. Upon the 
walls are many wonderful originals of pictures by the late Aubrey 
Beardsley, who was one of Mr. Smithers’s greatest friends during his 
brief but brilliant career. Mr. Smithers is of about medium height and 
very strongly built. He is clean-shaven, wears a single eye-glass, and 
has singularly clear-cut aristocratic features. A man who would be 
noticed in a crowd, he owes much of his success to his curious power 
of attracting people and holding their attention. He lives in a great 
palace of a house in Bedford Square. It was once the Spanish Embassy 
and is full of beautiful and costly things. . . . At his country house 
at Walton-on-Naze .. .” 

You see, an extravagant fellow, living in the grand style, the world 
his footstool—no expense spared. But the source of income a pro- 
digious mystery. Not above being sued in the law-courts nevertheless, 
for ridiculously small, even paltry, debts. A man of mystery. Such was 
Leonard Smithers; such the man who stepped into young Beardsley’s 
life on the eve of his twenty-third year, and lifted him out of the hu- 
miliation that had been put upon him. Well might Beardsley write: 
“a good friend as well as a publisher.” 

Smithers unlatched the gate of another garden to Beardsley; the 
which was to be a sad pity. Among this man’s activities was a danger- 
ous one of issuing private editions of works not fit for the general pub- 
lic. There are certain works of enormous value which can only thus 
be published. But it was owing to the licence thus given to Beardsley 
to exercise to the full the obscene taint in him, that the young fellow 


171 


oy Le ee ee re bP Oar i 
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was encouraged to give rein to his laboured literary indecency, his 
novel entitled in its bowdlerised form Under the Hill, and later to 
illustrations which are amongst the finest achievement of his rare 
craftsmanship, but hopelessly unfit for publication. 


Disgusted with The Yellow Book, Beardsley put his immediate past 
and influences behind him for ever, and went straight back to his 
beloved master Watteau, the one master who inspired all his highest 
achievement. His meeting Conder in the autumn greatly accelerated 
this return to the master of both. And with the brighter prospect now 
opening out before him, vigour came back to him, and the autumn 
and the early winter saw him wonderfully free from the terror that 
had again begun to dog his steps. 

Having hurriedly sold the house at 114 Cambridge Street and re- 
moved to 10 and 11 St. James’s Place, S. W., in the July of 1895, 
Beardsley in the late summer and early autumn was at Dieppe. Eased 
now from money cares by his contract with Smithers, and with The 
Savoy due to appear in December, he went back to his early inspira- 
tion from the 18th century, and at once his art burst into full 
song. 

Arthur Symons was at Dieppe in the autumn and there discovered 
Beardsley immersed in his work for The Savoy; but finds him now 
more concerned with literary aspirations than with drawing. He was 
hard at work upon his obscene novel Venus and Tannhduser, the so- 
called Under the Hill, and was keenly interested in verse, carrying the 
inevitable portfolio about with him under his arm wherever he went 
and scribbling phrases as they came to him. 

The black portfolio, carried under his arm, led to the waggery of a 

172 


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city wit that whilst Beardsley had turned his back upon the city he 
could not shake off the habits and atmosphere of the Insurance clerk 
for he always entered a room cautiously as if expecting to be kicked 
violently from behind and looked as if he had “called in on behalf of 
the Prudential.” 

It is the fashion amongst the gushing to say of Beardsley that “‘if 
his master genius had been turned seriously towards the world of 
letters, his success would have been as undoubted there as it was in 
the world of arts.”’ It is true that Beardsley by his rare essays into 
literature proved a sensitive ear for literary colour in words of an 
artificial type; but his every literary effort proved his barrenness in 
literary gifts. His literary efforts were just precisely what the under- 
graduate, let loose upon London town, mistakes for literature, as uni- 
versity magazines painfully prove. He had just precisely those gifts 
that slay art in literature and set up a dreary painted sepulchre in its 
stead. He could turn out an extraordinary mimicry of a dandified 
stylist of bygone days; and the very skill in this intensely laboured 
exercise proved his utter uncreativeness in literature. He had a really 
sound sense of lilt in verse that was strangely denied to him in prose. 
It is precisely the cheap sort of precious stuff that imposes on super- 
ficial minds—the sort of barren brilliance that is the bewildering 
product not only of the academies but that is affected also in cultured 
city and scholastic circles. 

Under the Hill was published in mutilated form in the coming 
Savoy, and afterwards in book form; and as such it baffles the wits to 
understand how it could have found a publisher, and how Arthur 
Symons could have printed this futile mutilated thing—if indeed 
he had any say in it, which is unthinkable. It is fantastic drivel, with- 

lpr 


out cohesion, without sense, devoid of art as of meaning—a sheer 
laboured stupidity, revealing nothing—a posset, a poultice of affec- 
tations. The real book, of which all this is the bowdlerised inanity, 
is another matter; but it was so obscene, it revealed the young fellow 
revelling in an orgy of eroticism so unbridled, that it was impossible 
to publish it except in the privately printed ventures of Smithers’s 
underground press. But the real book is at least a significance. It gives 
us the real Beardsley in a self-confession such as explains much that 
would be otherwise baffling in his art. It is a frank emotional en- 
deavour to utter the sexual ecstacies of a mind that dwells in a con- 
stant erotic excitement. To that extent at least it is art. Cut that only 
value out of it—a real revelation of life—and it yields us nothing but 
a nasty futility. But even the real book reveals a struggle with an in- 
strument of expression for which Beardsley’s gifts were quite as in- 
adequate as they were inadequate in the employment of colour to 
express emotion—even though in halting fashion it does discover the 
real unbridled Beardsley, naked and unashamed. It is literature at any 
rate compared with the fatuous ghost of it that was published to the 
world at large, the difference between a live man and a man of straw. 
As a literary effort the ‘“‘novel”’ is interesting rather in showing us 
Beardsley’s shortcomings than his promise. The occasionally happy 
images are artistic pictorially rather than in phrasing—hetter uttered 
pictorially than by words. Beardsley had the tuneless ear for literature 
that permits a man to write the hideous phrase “‘a historical essay.” 
In one so censorious as Beardsley in matters of letters and art it is 
strange to find him reeking with the ugly illiteracy of using words in 
prose that can only be employed in verse. There is a pedantic use of 
words which shows in Beardsley that innate vulgarity of mind and 
178 


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taste which seems to think that it is far more refined English to say 
that there is “‘an increased humidity in the atmosphere” than to say 
“it is raining.” We find in his prose “‘argent lakes,” “reticent waters,” 
“ombre gateways,” “‘ 


99 66 


taper-time,’’ “around its marge,” and suchlike 
elaborate affectations of phrasing, going cheek by jowl with the crude 
housemaidish vulgarisms of “the subtlest fish that ever were,” “any- 
how it was a wonderful lake’-—what Tree used wittily to call “re- 
faned” English and housemaid’s English jostling each other at a sort 
of literary remnant sale. Side by side with this pedantic phrasing, 


with the illiteracy of employing verse phrases in prose, and with the 


housemaid’s use of English, goes a crude vulgarity of cheap common- 


places such as: ““The children cried out, I can tell you,” “Ah, the rorty 
little things!”’, “The birds . . . kept up ajargoning and refraining” ; 
“commanded the most delicious view,” “‘it was a sweet little place’; 
“card tables with quite the daintiest and most elegant chairs”; “the 
sort of thing that fairly makes one melt’’; “said the fat old thing,” 
““Tannhauser’s scrumptious torso”; ‘‘a dear little coat,” “a sweet 
white muslin frock”’; “quite the prettiest that ever was,” and the rest 
of it. It is only when Beardsley lets himself go on the wings of erotic 
fancies and the sexual emotions that seem to have been the constant 
if eternal torment of his being, that he approaches a literary achieve- 
ment; and unfortunately it is precisely in these moods that publica- 
tion is impossible. 

This inability to create literature in a mind so skilful to translate 
or mimic the literature of the dead is very remarkable; but when we 
read a collection of Beardsley’s letters it is soon clear that he had been 
denied artistic literary gifts; for, the mind shows commonplace, un- 
intellectual, innocent of spontaneous wit of phrase or the colour of 


183 


words. It is almost incredible that the same hand that achieved 
Beardsley’s master-work in pen line could have been the same that 
shows so dullard in his letters to his friend John Gray. In them he re- 
veals no slightest interest in the humanities, in the great questions 
that vex the age—he is concerned solely with his health or some busi- 
ness of his trade, or railway fares or what not. His very religious con- 
version shows him commonplace and childish. Of any great spiritual 
upheaval, of any vast vision into the immensities, of any pity for his 
struggling fellows, not a sign! 

It is to the eternal credit of Arthur Symons as friend and critic that 
he did not encourage Beardsley in his literary aspirations, but turned 
him resolutely to the true utterance of his genius. It is in splendid 
contrast with a futile publication of Beardsley’s ‘Table Talk’? that 
others published. 

In Under the Hill Beardsley reveals his inability to see even art 
except through French spectacles. He cannot grasp the German soul, 
so he had to make Tannhiuser into an Abbé—it sounded more real 
to him. The book is a betrayal of the soul of the real Beardsley—a 
hard unlovely egoism even in his love-throes, without one noble or 
generous passion, incapable of a thought for his fellows, incapable of 
postulating a sacrifice, far less of making one, bent only on satisfying 
every lust in a dandified way that casts but a handsome garment over 
the basest and most filthy licence. It contains gloatings over acts so 
bestial that it staggers one to think of so refined a mind as Beardsley’s, 
judged by the exquisiteness of his line, not being nauseated by his 
own emotions. It is Beardsley’s testament—it explains his art, his 
life, his vision—and it proves the cant of all who try to excuse Beards- 
ley as a satirist. A satirist does not gloat over evil, he lashes it. 


184 


THE THREE MUSICIANS 
from “The Savoy” No. 1. 


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TAILPIECE TO “THE THREE MUSICIANS” 


Beardsley revelled in it. Nay, he utterly despised as being vulgar and 
commonplace all such as did not revel in it. 

The story of Venus and Tannhéuser, bowdlerised as Under the Hilt 
—by which Beardsley slyly means what he calls the Venusberg, for 
even Beardsley feared to write the Mons Veneris,—he seemed :‘un- 
decided as to which to call it—the story was without consequence, 
without cohesion, without unity; it was the laboured stringing to- 
gether of little phrases, word pictures of moods, generally obscene 
moods and desires such as come to plague a certain type of consump- 
tive whose life burns at fever heat in the troubled blood. We know 
from Arthur Symons that Beardsley was for ever jotting down pas- 
sages, epithets, newly coined words, in pencil in odd moments during 
this month at Dieppe. He gives us a picture of Beardsley, restless, un- 
able to work except in London, never in the least appealed to by na- 
ture. Beardsley never walked abroad; Symons never saw him look at 
the sea. When the night fell, Beardsley came out and haunted the 
casino, gazing at the life that passed. He loved to sit in the large de- 
serted rooms when no one was there—to flit awhile into the room 
where the children danced—the sound of music always drew him to 
the concerts. He always carries the inevitable portfolio with him and 
is for ever jotting down notes. He writes in a little writing room for 
visitors. He agonises over a phrase—he pieces the over-polished sen- 


_ tences and phrases together like a puzzle, making them fit where best 


they can. He bends all his wits to trying to write verse. He hammers 

out the eight stanzas of The Three Musicians with infinite travail on 

the grassy ramparts of the old castle, and by dogged toil he brings 

forth the dainty indecencies, as later he chiselled and polished and 

chiselled the translation from Catullus. The innate musical sense of 
187 


the fellow gives the verse rhythm and colour. But Beardsley failed, 
and was bound to fail, in literature, whether in verse or prose, because 
he failed to understand the basic significance of art. He failed because 
he tried to make literature an intellectual act of mimicry instead of an 
emotional act—he failed because all academism is a negation of art, 
because he mistook craftsmanship as the end of art instead of the in- 
strument for emotional revelation. As Symons puts it, “it was a thing 
done to order,” in other words it was not the child of the vital impulse 
of all art whatsoever, he could not or did not create a make-believe 
whereby he sought to transmit his emotions to his fellows, for he was 
more concerned with trying to believe in his make-believe itself. It 
was not the child of emotional utterance, like his drawings—it was a 
deliberately intellectual act done in a polished form. We feel the ap- 
ing of Wilde, of Whistler, of the old aphorists, like Pope, of the 
eighteenth century Frenchman: He uses his native tongue as if it were 
obsolete, a dead language—he is more concerned with dead words 
than with live. He tries to create a world of the imagination; but he 
cannot make it alive even for himself—he cannot fulfil a character in 
it or raise a single entity into life out of a fantastic Wardour Street of 
fine clothes—there is no body, far less soul, in the clothes. He is not 
greatly concerned with bringing people to life; he is wholly concerned 


with being thought a clever fellow with words. He is in this akin to 
Oscar Wilde. | 


It was whilst at Dieppe that the famous French painter Jacques 
Blanche made a fine portrait of Beardsley; and in this hospitable 
friend’s studio it was that Beardsley set up the canvas for the picture 
he was always going to paint but never did. And it was to Beardsley’s 

188 


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infinite delight that Symons took him to Puy to see the author of one 
of Beardsley’s chief literary loves, La Dame aux Camélias—Alexandre 
Dumas, fils. 

Charles Conder also painted a rather indifferent portrait of Beards- 
ley in oils which seems to have vanished. But the two finest portraits 
of Beardsley the man are word-portraits by Arthur Symons and Max 
Beerbohm. 

Symons speaks of Beardsley at this time as imagining himself to 
be “unable to draw anywhere but in England.’ This was not neces- 
sarily an affectation of Beardsley’s as Symons seems to think; it is 
painfully common to the artistic temperament which often cannot 
work at all except in the atmosphere of its workshop. 

He was now working keenly at The Savoy drawings and the illus- 
trations for his bowdlerised Under the Hill, to be produced serially in 
that magazine. The first number was due to appear in December 1895, 
and the rich cover-design in black on the pink paper of the boards, 
showed, in somewhat indelicate fashion, Beardsley’s contempt for The 
Yellow Book, but the contempt had to be suppressed and a second 
edition of the cover printed instead. Though the prospectus for The 
Savoy, being done late in the autumn of 1895, announced the first 
number for December, The Savoy eventually had to be put off until 
the New Year; meantime, about the Yuletide of 1895, Beardsley com- 
menced work upon the famous sequence of masterpieces for The Rape 
of the Lock, announced for publication in February, and which we 
know was being sold in March. 

In January 1896 The Savoy appeared, and made a sensation in the 
art world only to be compared with the public sensation of The Yellow 
Book. It was a revelation of genius. It thrust Beardsley forward with 


193 


a prodigious stride. The fine cover design, the ivory-like beauty of the 
superb Title Page—the two black-masked figures in white before a 
dressing table—the deft witty verses of the naughty Three Musicians, 
the Bathers on Dieppe Beach, the three sumptuously rich designs of 
The Abbé, the Toilet of Helen, and The Fruit-bearers for the novel 
Under the Hill which began in this number, capped by the stately 
Christmas Card of The Madonna and Child lifted the new magazine 
at a stroke into the rank of the books of the year. 

The great French engravers of the 18th century, St. Aubin and the 
rest, with the high achievement of the Illustrators of the Sixties which 
Gleeson White constantly kept before Beardsley’s eyes, had guided 
him to a craftsmanship of such musical intensity that he had evolved 
from it all, prenticed to it by the facility acquired from his Morte 
d’ Arthur experience, an art that was pure music. It was a revelation 
even to us who were well versed in Beardsley’s achievement. And the 
artistic and literary society of London had scarce recovered breath 
from its astonishment when about the end of F ebruary there appeared 
the masterpieces of Beardsley’s illustrations to The Rape of the Lock 
—masterpieces of design and of mood that set Beardsley in the first 
rank, from the beautiful cover to the cul-de-lampe, The New Star— 
with the sumptuous and epoch-making drawings of The Dream, the 
exquisite Billet-Doux, the Toilet, the Baron’s Prayer, and the magnifi- 
cent Rape of the Lock and Battle of the Beaux and Belles. 

The advance in art is prodigious. We now find Beardsley, on return- 
ing to the influences which were his true Inspiration, at once coming 
nearer to nature, and, most interesting of all, employing line in an 
extraordinarily skilful way to represent material surfaces—we find 
silks and satins, brocades and furs, ormulu and wood, stone and metal, 


194, 


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THE TOILET 


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THE RAPE OF THE LOCK 


= 


each being uttered into our senses by line absolutely attune to and 
interpretive of their surface and fibre and quality. We find a freedom 
of arrangement and a largeness of composition that increase his de- 
sign as an orchestra is greater than its individual instruments. In the 
two drawings of The Rape of the Lock and The Battle of the Beaux 
and Belles it is interesting to note with what consummate skill the 
white flesh of the beauties is suggested by the sheer wizardry of the 
single enveloping line; with what skill of dotted line he expresses the 
muslins and gossamer fabrics; with what unerring power the silks and 
satins and brocades are rendered, all as distinctly rendered materially 
__as the hair of the perukes; but above all and dominating all is the co- 
hesion and one-ness of the orchestration in giving forth the mood of 
the thing. 


By grim destiny it was so ordained that this triumph of Beardsley’s 
life should come to him in bitter anguish. He was in Brussels in the 
February of 1896 when he had a bad breakdown. It came as a hideous 
scare to him. He lay seriously ill at Brussels for some considerable 
time. Returning to England in May, he was thenceforth to start upon 
that desperate flitting from the close pursuit by death that only ended 
in the grave. He determined to get the best opinion in London on his 
state—he was about to learn the dread verdict. 

The second number of The Savoy appeared in April, as a quarterly, 
and its charming cover-design of Choosing the New Hat screened a 
sad falling off in the output of the stricken man—for the number con- 
tained but the Footnote portrait of himself; the Third Tableau of 
“Das Rheingold” which he had probably already done before going 
to Brussels; a scene from The Rape of the Lock; and but one illustra- 

199 


tion to Under the Hill, the Ecstasy of Saint Rose of Lima; whilst the 
beautiful Title Page of No. I had to do duty again for No. II—in all 
but four new drawings! 

Beardsley struggled through May with a cover for the next—the 
third—number of The Savoy to appear in July, the driving of Cupid 
from the Garden, and worked upon the poem of the Ballad of a Bar- 
ber, making the wonderful line drawing for it called The Coifing, with 
a silhouette cul-de-lampe of Cupid with the gallows: but his body was 
rapidly breaking down. 

On the 5th of June he was at 17 Campden Grove, Kensington, writ- 
ing the letter which announces the news that was his Death Warrant, 
in which Dr. Symes Thompson pronounced very unfavourably on his 
condition this day, and ordered absolute quiet and if possible imme- 
diate change, wringing from the afflicted man the anguished CrYs ck 
am beginning to be really depressed and frightened about myself.” 
From this dread he was henceforth destined never to be wholly free. 
It was to stand within the shadows of his room wheresoever he went. 
He was about to start upon that flight to escape from it that was to be 
the rest of his wayfaring; but he no sooner flits to a new place than 
he sees it taking stealthy possession of the shadows almost within 
reach of his hand. It is now become for Beardsley a question of how 
long he can flit from the Reaper, or by what calculated stratagem he 
can keep him from his side if but for a little while. . . . In this June 
of 1896 was written that “Note” for the July Savoy, No. 3, announc- 
ing the end of Under the Hill—Beardsley has made his first surrender. 

So in mid-1896, on the edge of twenty-four, Beardsley began his 
last restless journey, flitting from place to place to rid himself of the 
terror. It was not the least bitter part of this wayfaring that he had to 

200 


Ss 


Litt 


iS 


THE BATTLE OF THE BEAUX AND THE BELLES 


THE BARON’S PRAYER 


F 


turn his back on London town. It has always been one of the fatuous 
falsities of a certain group of Beardsley’s apologists to write as if 
London had ignored him, and to infer that he owed his recognition to 
alien peoples—it was London that found him, London that raised him 
to a dizzy eminence even beyond his stature in art, as Beardsley him- 
self feared; and to Beardsley London was the hub of the world. It was 
the London of electric-lit streets in which flaunted brazenly the be- 
dizened and besmirched women and men, painted and overdressed 
for the hectic part they played in the tangle of living, if you will; but 
it was the London that Beardsley loved above all the world. And 
though Beardsley had had to sell his home in London, he carried his 
spiritual home with him—clung to a few beloved pieces of Chippen- 
dale furniture and to his books and the inspiration of his genius—the 
engravings after Watteau, Lancret, Pater, Prud’hon, and the like; 
above all he clung to the two old Empire ormulu candle-sticks without 
which he was never happy at his work. 

By the 6th of July he had moved to the Spread Eagle Hotel at 
Epsom; where he set to work on illustrating Ali Baba and the Forty 
Thieves as a Christmas Book—for which presumably was the fine 
Ali Baba in the Wood. But sadly enough, the poor stricken fellow is 
now fretted by his “entire inability to walk or exert himself in the 
least.” Suddenly he bends all his powers on illustrating Lysistrata! 
and in this July of 1896, broken by disease, he pours out such blithe 
and masterly drawings for the Lysistrata as would have made any 
man’s reputation—but alas! masterpieces so obscene that they could 
only be printed privately. However, the attacks of hemorrhage from 
the lungs were now very severe, and the plagued man had to prepare 
for another move—it is a miracle that, with death staring him in the 


205 


face, and with his tormented body torn with disease, Beardsley could 
have brought forth these gay lyrical drawings wrought with such 
consummate skill that unfortunately the world at large can never look 
upon—the Lysistrata. It is almost unthinkable that Beardsley’s mind 
could have allowed his exquisite art to waste itself upon the frank ob- 
scenity which he knew, when he drew these wonderful designs, must 
render them utterly impossible for publication—that he should have — 
deliberately sacrificed so much to the naughtinesses. Yet as art they 
are of a high order—they utter the emotions of unbridled sexuality 
in reckless fashion—their very mastery renders them the more im- 
possible to publish. He knew himself full well that the work was 
masterwork—"‘I have just completed a set of illustrations to Lysis- 
trata, I think they are in a way the best things I have ever done,” he 
writes to his friend the priest, John Gray, who is now striving his 
hardest to win him into the Roman Catholic Church. Gray realises 
that the end is near. Beardsley planned that the Lysistrata should be 
printed in pale purple. . . . It was probable that Beardsley reached 
the Lysistrata of Aristophanes through the French translation of 
Maurice Donnay—he was so anxious to assert that the purple illustra- 
tions were to appear with the work of Aristophanes in book form, not 
with Donnay’s translation! The Lysistrata finished, he turned to the 
translation and obscene illustration of the Sixth Satire of Juvenal. 
But even before the month of July was out, he had to be packed 
off hurriedly to Pier View, Boscombe, by Bournemouth, where, in a 
sad state of health, he passed his twenty-fourth birthday. The place 
made his breathing easier, but the doctor is “afraid he cannot stop 
the mischief.” Beardsley found relief—in the Juvenal drawings! “I 
am beginning to feel that I shall be an exile from all nice places for 
206 


ie 


| 
i 
FUSE 


THE COIFFING 


te) 


COVER DESIGN FOR ‘“‘THE SAVOY” NO. 4. 


the rest of my days,” he writes pathetically. He loathed Boscombe. 

With the July number, No. 3, The Savoy became a monthly maga- 
zine; and there is no doubt that its monthly appearance did much to 
arouse Beardsley to spurts of effort to make drawings, for he had an 
almost passionate love for the magazine. Yet this J uly that gave us the 
Lysistrata sequence only yielded the fine cover for the August Savoy, 
No. 4—but what a cover! To think that Beardsley drew this beautiful 
design of the lady beside a stand with grapes, beyond a gauze curtain, 
in the same month that he drew the Lysistrata sequence, and that it 
is the only design that could be published! It at least gives the world 
a hint of what it lost. 

August at Boscombe yielded but the richly wrought cover of the 
Two Figures and the Terminal god beside a dark lake, for the S eptem- 
ber Savoy, No. 5, which he stupidly signed Giulio Floriani, and the 
uninteresting commonplace wash drawing in white on brown paper of 
The Woman in White which he had made from the Bon Mots line 
drawing long before—there was now much searching amongst the 
drawings and scraps lying in the portfolio. But in spite of a racked 
body, the cover-design showed him at his most sumptuous employ- 
ment of black and white. 

It should be noticed that from his twenty-fourth birthday, after 
signing the farcical Giulio Floriani, he thenceforth signs his work 
with his initials A. B., in plain letters, usually in a corner of his draw- 
ing within, or without; a small square label. It is true that three draw- 
ings made after his twenty-fourth birthday bear his full name, but 
they were all made at this time. The Wagnerian musical drawings 
were most of them “in hand,” but Smithers and Beardsley agreed 
that they should not be ‘“‘unloaded” in a bunch, but made to trickle 

211 


through the issues of The Savoy so as to prevent a sense of monotony 
——we shall see before the year is out that they had to be “unloaded 
in a bunch” at the last. It is therefore not safe to date any Wagnerian 
drawings with the month of their issue. It is better to go by the form — 
of signature. Then again Beardsley’s hideous fight for life had begun, 
and Arthur Symons was in a difficulty as to how many drawings he 
might get from month to month, though there was always a Wagner 
to count upon as at least one. The full signatures on the Death of 
Pierrot and the Cover for the Book of Fifty Drawings are the last sig- 
natures in full; and both were drawn in early September soon after 
his birthday, as we are about to see. 

Beardsley unfortunately went up to London in this August on ur- 
gent business, and had a serious breakdown by consequence, with 
return of the bleeding from the lungs—a train journey always upset 
him. He had to keep his room at Boscombe for weeks. And he was in 
so enfeebled a state that the doctors decided to let him risk the winter 
at Boscombe as he was now too weak to travel to the South of France. 
A despairing cry escapes his lips again: “It seems I shall never be out 
of the wood.” 

The end of August and early September yielded the pathetic Death 
of Pierrot that seems a prophecy of his own near end on which he was 
now brooding night and day. His strength failed him for a Cover de- 
sign, so the powerful Fourth Tableau of “Das Rheingold” had to be 
used as a cover for the October Savoy No. 5. The Death of Pierrot is 
wonderful for the hush a-tiptoe of its stealthy-footed movement and 
the sense of the passion of Pierrot, as it is remarkable for the unusual 
literary beauty of its written legend. . 

one 


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NAS 
WANG, 
MLV 


COVER DESIGN FOR ‘‘THE SAVOY” NO. 7. 


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September brought snow to Boscombe, which boded ill for Beards- 
ley’s winter. 

It was in this September that Leonard Smithers, opened his new 
offices at 4 and 5 Royal Arcade, Bond Street, whither he had moved 
from the first offices of The Savoy at Effingham House, Arundel Street, 
Strand; and it was now from his office and shop in the Royal Arcade 
that he proposed to Beardsley the collecting of his best works al- 
ready done, and their publication in an Album of Fifty Drawings, to 
appear in the Autumn. The scheme, which greatly delighted Beards- 
ley in his suffering state, would hold little bad omen in its sugges- 
tion of the end of a career to a man who had himself just drawn the 
Death of Pierrot. It roused him to the congenial effort of drawing the 
Cover for A Book of Fifty Drawings. The fifty drawings were collected 
and chosen with great care and huge interest by Beardsley, and this 
makes it clear that he had drawn about this time, in or before Sep- 
tember, the beautifully designed if somewhat suggestive Bookplate of 
the Artist for himself which appeared later as almost the last of the 
Fifty Drawings. In spite of Beardsley’s excitement and enthusiasm, 
however, the book dragged on to near Christmas time, owing largely 
to the delay caused by the difficulties that strewed Vallance’s path in 
drawing up and completing the iconography. It is a proof of the.ex- 
traordinary influences which trivial and unforeseen acts may have upon 
a man’s career that the moving of Smithers to the Royal Arcade greatly 
extended Beardsley’s public, as his latest work was at once on view to 
passers-by who frequented this fashionable resort. | 

The October of 1896 saw Beardsley draw the delightful Cover for 
the November Savoy, No. 7, of spectacled old age boring youth “by 
the book” (there was much chatter at this time over Ibsen’s phrase 

217 


of “Youth is knocking at the Gate”). Beardsley also wrote the beau- 
tiful translation, and made the even more beautiful and famous draw- 
ing Ave atque Vale or “Hail and Farewell” for the Carmen C I of 
Catullus, whilst the third illustration for the November Savoy, the 
small Tristan and Isolde, shows his interest maintained in the musical 
sequence that was ever present in his thoughts, and which he intended 
to be gathered into book-form. Indeed, the whole of this October, 
Beardsley was at work writing a narrative version of Wagner’s Das 
Rheingold, “‘most of the illustrations being already finished,” as he 
himself testifies. Dent, to whom he had sent the drawing of Tann- 
hduser returning to the Horselberg, was trying to induce Beardsley at 
this time to illustrate the Pilgrim’s Progress for him. The month of 
October had opened for Beardsley happy and cheerful over a bright 
fire with books; it went out in terror for him. He fights hard to clamber. 
from the edge of the grave that yawns, and he clutches at gravelly 
ground. A fortnight’s bleeding from the lungs terrified him. “I am 
quite paralysed with fear,”’ he cries—“I have told no one of it. It’s so 
dreadful to be so weak as I am becoming. Today I had hoped to pilfer 
ships and seashores from Claude, but work is out of the question.” 
Yet before the last of October he was more hopeful again and took 
“quite a long walk and was scarcely tired at all afterwards. So my. 
fortnight’s bleeding does not seem to have done me much injury.” His. 
only distress made manifest was that he could not see his sister Mabel, 
about to start on her American theatrical tour. 

November was to be rich in achievement for Aubrey Beardsley. It 
was to see him give to the world one of the most perfect designs that 
ever came from his hands, a design that seems to sum up and crown 
the achievement of this great period of his art—he writes that he has 

218 


* Re scesseees 


nt RS re ae? 


74 
en 
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Co o 


PIERROT WITH THE HOUR-GLASS 


HEADPIECE 


Crit WeaeyLaG 


3 
3 


sos, 


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Na ssneneelge Sao, 


oy) 


NS 


TAILPIECE TO ‘‘PIERROT OF THE MINUTE” 


just finished “‘rather a pretty set of drawings for a foolish playlet of 
Ernest Dowson’s, The Pierrot of the Minute,” which was published in 
the following year of 1897—a grim irony that a boredom should have 
brought forth such beauty! As he writes Finis to this exquisite work, 
he begs for a good book to illustrate! Yet on the 5th of this November 
a cry of despair escapes him: “Neither rest or fine weather seem to 
avail anything.” | 

There is something pathetic in this eager search for a book to illus- 
trate at a moment when Beardsley has achieved the fery of one de- 
sign in particular of the several good designs in the Pierrot of the 
Minute, that “cul-de-lampe” in which Pierrot, his jesting done, is 
leaving the garden, the beauty and hauntingness of the thing won- 
drously enhanced by the dotted tracery of its enclosing framework— 
a tragic comment on the wonderful Headpiece when Pierrot holds up 
the hour-glass with its sands near run out. It is a sigh, close on a sob, 
blown across a sheet of white paper as by magic rather than the work 
of human hands. 

It was in this November that there appeared the futile essay on 
Beardsley by Margaret Armour which left Beardsley cold except for 
the appearance of his own Outline Profile Portrait of himself in line, 
“an atrocious portrait of me,” which he seems to have detested for 
some reason difficult to plumb—it is neither good nor bad, and cer- 
tainly not worse than one or two things that he passed with approval 
at this time for the Book of Fifty Drawings. It is a pathetically tragic 
thought that the November of the exquisite Pierrot of the Minute was 
for Beardsley a month of terrible suffering. He had not left his room 
for six weeks. Yet, for all his sad state, he fervently clings to the belief 
that change will rid him of that gaunt spectre that flits about the shad. 

221 


ows of his room. “I still continue in a very doubtful state, a sort of 
helpless, hopeless condition, as nobody really seems to know what is 
the matter with me. I fancy it is only change I want, & that my trou- 
bles are principally nervous. . . . It is nearly six weeks now since I 
have left my room. I am busy with drawing & should like to be with 
writing, but cannot manage both in my weak state.’’ He complains 
bitterly of the wretched weather. “I have fallen into a depressed 
state,” and ““Boscombe is ignominiously dull.” 

“It was now that Beardsley himself saw, for the first time, the pub- 
lished prints for the cover and the title-page of Evelina—of his “own 
early designing.” | : 

The Savoy for December gives us some clue to the busy work upon 
drawings in November of which he speaks, but some of the drawings 
that now appeared were probably done somewhat before this time. 

It was soon clear that the days of The Savoy were numbered and 
the editor and publisher decided that the December number must be 
the last. The farewell address to the public sets down the lack of pub- 
lic support as the sole reason; but it was deeper than that. Beardsley, 
spurred to it by regret, put forth all his remaining powers to make it 
a great last number if it must be so. For he drew one of the richest 
and most sumptuous of his works, the beautiful 4 Répétition of Tris- 
tan and Isolde—and he flung into the number all the drawings he now 
made or had made for Das Rheingold, which included thé marvel- 
lously decorative Frontispiece for the Comedy of The Rheingold, that 
“sings” with colour, and which he dated 1897, as he often post-dated 
his drawings, revealing that he had intended the long-cherished book 
for the following year; but the other designs for the Comedy are the 
unimportant fragments Flosshilde and Erda and Alberich; which he, 

\ Zoe 


A REPETITION OF “TRISTAN UND ISOLDE” 


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as likely as not, had by him, as it was in October that he wrote of ‘‘most 
of the illustrations being finished.” He now drew his two portraits of 
musicians, the Mendelssohn and the Weber; he somewhat fumbles 
with his Don Juan, Sganarelle, and the Beggar from that Don Juan of 
Moliere which he had ever been eager to illustrate; he gives us the 
Mrs. Margery Pinchwife from Wycherley’s Country Wife; he very 
sadly disappoints us with his Count Valmont from Laclos’ Les Liai- 
sons Dangereuses for the illustration of which Beardsley had held out 
such high hopes; and he ends with Et in Arcadia Ego. 

It does the public little credit that there was such scant support for 
The Savoy that it had to die. The farewell note to the last number an- 
nounces that The Savoy is in future to be half-yearly and a much 
higher price. But it was never to be. After all, everything depended 
on Beardsley, and poor Beardsley’s sands were near run out. 

Meantime Beardsley had been constantly fretting at the delay in 
the appearance of The Book of Fifty Drawings which he had com- 
pleted in September, in spite of the date 1897 on the cover-design— 
an afterthought of Smithers, who as a matter of fact sent me an ad- 
vance copy at Beardsley’s request in December 1896. 

The December Savoy, then, No. 8 and the last, saw Beardsley un- 
load all his Wagnerian drawings. Through the month he was toying 
with the idea of illustrating translations of two of his favourite books, 
Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Laclos, and Stendhal’s Adolphe. . 

On a Sunday, early in December, he spent the afternoon “inter- 
viewing himself for The Idler’’—the interview that appeared in that 
magazine, shaped and finished by Lawrence in March 1897. 

About Christmas his edition of Les Liaisons Dangereuses was tak- 
ing shape in his brain with its scheme for initial letters to each of the 

at 


170 letters, and ten full-page illustrations, and a frontispiece to each 
of the two volumes; but it was to get no further than Beardsley’s en- 
thusiasm. At this Yuletide appeared The Book of Fifty Drawings, in 
which for the first time were seen the Ali Baba in the Wood, the Book- 
plate of the Artist, and the Atalanta in Calydon with the hound. This 
book holds the significant revelation of Beardsley’s own estimate of 
his achievement up to this time, for he chose his fifty best drawings; 
it holds therefore the amusing confession that he did not always know 
what was his best work. It is interesting to note that Beardsley in- 
cludes the mediocre and commonplace Merlin in a circle, yet omits 
some of his finest designs. It is all the more interesting in that Beards- 
ley not only laid a ban on a considerable amount of his early work, 
but made Smithers give him his solemn oath and covenant that he 
would never allow to be published, if he could prevent it, certain defi- 
nite drawings—he particularly forbade anything from the Scrap Book 
then belonging to Ross, for he shrewdly suspected Ross’s malicious 
thwarting of every endeavour on Beardsley’s behalf to exchange good, 
and even late drawings, for these early commonplaces and inade- 
quacies. And Smithers to my certain knowledge had in my presence 
solemnly vowed to prevent such publication. When Beardsley was 
dead, it is only fair to Smithers to say that he did resist the temptation 
until Ross basely overpersuaded him to the scandalous betrayal. How- 
ever that was not as yet. . . . Evidently, though the fifty drawings 
were selected and decided upon in September, Beardsley changed one 
October drawing for something thrown out, for the October Ave atque 
Vale appears; and it may be that the Atalanta in Calydon with the 
hound, sometimes called Diana, and the Beardsley Bookplate together 
with the Self-portrait silhouette that makes the Finis to the Iconog- 

228 


Mol he 


ATALANTA—WITH THE HOUND 


BEARDSLEY’S BOOK PLATE 


eas nae 


raphy, may have been done as late, and replaced other drawings. 
Beardsley dedicated the book of his collected achievement to the man 
who had stood by him in fair weather and in foul from the very begin- 
ning—Joseph Pennell. It was the least he could do. 

December had begun with more hope for Beardsley—his lung 
gave him little or no trouble; he “suffers from Boscombe more than 
anything else.” And even though a sharp walk left him breathless, he 
felt he could scarcely call himself an invalid now, but the walk made 
him nervous. He is even looking forward to starting housekeeping in 
London again, with his sister; he hungers for town; indeed would 
be “‘abjectly thankful for the smallest gaieties & pleasures in town.” 
And were it not that he was nervous about taking walks abroad, he 
was becoming quite hopeful again when—taking a walk about New 
Year’s Eve he suddenly broke down; he “had some way to walk in a 
dreadful state” before he could get any help. And he began the New 
Year with the bitter cry: “‘So it all begins over again. It’s so disheart- 
_ ening.” He had “‘collapsed in all directions,” and it was decided to 
take him to some more bracing place as soon as he was fit to be moved. 


So ended the great Savoy period! Beardsley’s triumphs seemed fated 
to the span of twelve moons. 


233 


IX 
THE GREAT PERIOD 


ESSAYS IN WASH AND LINE 


1897 to the End—Twenty-Five 
Il. THE AQUATINTESQUES 


So ill-health like a sleuth-hound dogged the fearful man. Beardsley 
was now twenty-four and a half years of age—the great Savoy achieve- 
ment at an end. 

The Yuletide of 1896 had gone out; and the New Year of 1897 
came in amidst manifold terrors for Aubrey Beardsley. All hopes of 
carrying on The Savoy had to be abandoned. Beardsley’s condition 
was so serious at the New Year that he had to be moved from Pier 
View to a house called Muriel in Exeter Road at Bournemouth, where 
the change seemed to raise his spirits and mend his health awhile. He 
was very funny about the name of his new lodgings: “I suffer a little 
from the name of this house, I feel as shy of my address as a boy at 
school is of his Christian name when it is Ebenezer or Aubrey,” he 
writes whimsically. He began to find so much relief at Muriel, not- 
withstanding, that he was soon planning to have rooms in London 
again—at Manchester Street. 

By the February he was benefited by the change, for he was 

“sketching out pictures to be finished later,” and is delighted with 
Boussod Valadon’s reproduction in gravure of his Frontispiece for 
234 


sn ssi 


SE a RMP ile A Me Se Ma 


THE LADY WITH THE MONKEY 


ne 


Theophile Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin, for which he was now 
making the half-dozen beautiful line and wash drawings, in the style 
of the old aquatint-engravers. These wonderful drawings done—-scant 
wonder that he vowed that Boussod Valadon should ever after repro- 
duce his works !—he employed the same craftsmanship for the famous 
Bookplate for Miss Custance, later the wife of Lord Alfred Douglas, 
and he also designed the Arbuscula for Gaston Vuillier’s History of 
Dancing. For sheer beauty of handling, these works reveal powers in 
Beardsley’s keeping and reach which make the silencing of them by 
death one of the most hideous tragedies in art. The music that they 
hold, the subtlety of emotional statement, and the sense of colour that 
suffuses them, raise Beardsley to the heights. It is a bewildering dis- 
play of Beardsley’s artistic courage, impossible to exaggerate, that he 
should have created these blithe masterpieces, a dying man. 

Suddenly the shadows were filled with terrors again. The bleeding 
had almost entirely ceased from his lung when his liver started copious 
bleeding instead. It frightened the poor distressed man dreadfully, 
and made him too weak and nervous to face anything. A day or two 
afterwards he was laughing at his fears of yesterday. A burst of sun- 
shine makes the world a bright place to live in; but he sits by the fire 
and dreads to go out. “‘At present my mind is divided between the fear 
of getting too far away from England, & the fear of not getting enough 
sunshine, or rather warmth near home.”’ But the doctors had evidently 
said more to Mrs. Beardsley than to her son, for his mother decided 
now and in future to be by Beardsley’s side. Almost the last day of 
February saw his doctor take him out to a concert—a great joy to the 
stricken man—and no harm done. 

In March he was struggling against his failing body’s fatigue to 

Perak 


draw. He also started a short story The Celestial Lover, for which he 
was making a coloured picture; for he had bought a paint-box. March 
turned cold, and Beardsley had a serious set-back. The doctor pursed 
a serious lip over his promise to let him go up to town—to Beardsley’s 
bitter disappointment. The doctor now urged a move to the South—if 
only even to Brittany. Beardsley began to realise that the shadows in 
his room were again haunted; “I fancy I can count my life by months 
now.” Yet a day or two later, “Such blessed weather to-day, trees in 
all directions are putting forth leaves.” Then March went out with 
cold winds, and bleeding began again, flinging back the poor distracted 
fellow amongst the terrors. He wrote from his bed and in pencil: “Oh 
how tired I am of hearing my lung creak all day, like a badly made 
pair of boots. . . . I think of the past winter and autumn with un- 
relieved bitterness.» The move to London for the South was at last 
decided upon, for the first week in April—to the South of France by 
easy stages. He knew now that he could never be cured, but he hoped 
that the ravages of the disease could be prevented from becoming 
rapid. 

On the 30th of March in a letter to his friend John Gray, now even 
more eager to win him to the Church of Rome, he pleads that he ought 
to have the right to beg for a few months more of life—“Don’t think 
me foolish to haggle about a few months”—as he has two or three 
pictured short stories he wants to bring out; but on the following day, 
Wednesday the 31st of March 1897, he was received into the Roman 
Catholic Church—on the Friday after, the 2nd of April, he took the 
Sacrament which had to be brought to him, to his great grief, since 
he could not go to the Church. He was to be a Roman Catholic for 

238 


near upon a twelvemonth. From this day of his entering the Church 
of Rome he wrote to John Gray as “My dear brother.” 

There is something uncanny in the aloofness of Beardsley’s art 
from his life and soul. His art gives no slightest trace of spiritual up- 
heaval. It is almost incredible that a man, if he were really going 
through an emotional spiritual upheaval or ecstasy, could have been 
drawing the designs for Mademoiselle de Maupin, or indeed steeping 
in that novel at all, or drawing the Arbuscula. For months he has been 
led by the friendship of the priest John Gray towards Holy Church; 
yet it is not six months since he has put the last touches on Under the 
Hill! and drawn the designs for Lysistrata and the Juvenal! not five 
months since he has drawn his Bookplate! And by the grim irony of 
circumstance, he entered the Church of Rome in the same month that 
there appeared in The Idler his confession: ‘To my mind there is 
nothing so depressing as a Gothic Cathedral. I hate to have the sun 
shut out by the saints.” This interview in the March Idler by Lawrence, 
one of the best interviewers of this time, who made the framework and 
then with astute skill persuaded Beardsley to fill in the details, was 
as we know from Beardsley’s own letters to his friend John Gray, 
written by himself about the Yuletide of the winter just departing. 
That interview will therefore remain always as an important evidence 
by Beardsley of his artistic ideals and aims and tastes. It is true that 
he posed and strutted in that interview; and, having despatched it, 
was a little ashamed of it, with a nervous “hope I have not said too 
many foolish things.” But it is a baffling tribute to the complexity of 
the human soul that the correspondence with the poet-priest John 
Gray proves that whilst John Gray, whose letters are hidden from us, 
239 


was leading Beardsley on his spiritual journey to Rome, he was 
lending him books and interesting him in books, side by side with 
lives of the saints, which were scarcely remarkable for their fellow- 
ship with the saints. 

Beardsley was rapidly failing. On Wednesday, the 7th of April, a 
week after joining the Church of Rome, he passed through London, 
staying a day or two at the Windsor Hotel—a happy halt for Beardsley 
as his friend John Gray was there to meet him—and crossed to 
France, where on Saturday the 18th of April he wrote from the Hotel 
Voltaire, quai Voltaire, in Paris, reporting his arrival with his devoted 
mother. Paris brought back hope and cheerfulness to the doomed man. 
He loved to be in Paris; and it was in his rooms at this hotel that in 
May he was reading The Hundred and One Nights for the first time, 
and inspired by it, drew his famous Cover for Ali Baba, a masterpiece 
of musical line, portraying a seated obese voluptuous Eastern figure 
resplendent with gems—as Beardsley himself put it, “quite a sump- 
tuous design.” 

Beardsley had left Bournemouth in a state of delight at the pros- 
pect of getting to the South of France into the warmth and the sun- 
shine. He felt that it would cure him and cheat the grave. In Paris he 
was soon able to walk abroad and to be out of doors again—perhaps 
it had been better otherwise, for he might then have gone further to 
the sun. There was the near prospect also of his sister, Mabel Beards- 
ley’s return from America and their early meeting. He could now 
write from a café: “I rejoice greatly at being here again.” And though 
he could not get a sitting-room at the hotel, his bed was in an alcove 
which, being shut off by a curtain, left him the possession by day of a 
sitting-room and thereby rid him of the obsession of a sick room—he 

240 


COVER DESIGN FOR ‘“‘THE FORTY THIEVES”’ 


- 


could forget he was a sick man. And though the hotel was without a 
lift, the waiters would carry him up stairs—he could not risk the 
climbing. And the bookshops and print-shops of Paris were an eternal 
joy to him. 

With returning happiness he was eating and drinking and sleeping 
better. He reads much of the lives of the saints; is comforted by his 
new religion; reads works of piety, and—goes on his way poring over 
naughtinesses. But he has thrust the threatening figure of death out 
of his room awhile—talks even of getting strong again quite soon. 
But the usually genial month of May in Paris came in sadly for 
Beardsley, and the sombre threat flitted back into the shadows of his 
room again. He had the guard of an excellent physician, and the fol- 
lowing day he felt well again; but he begs Gray to pray for him. A 
month to St. Germain-en-Laye, just outside Paris, was advised; and, 
Beardsley, going out to see the place, was delighted with its pictur- 
esqueness—indeed St. Germain-en-Laye was an ideal place to inspire 
him to fresh designs. The Terrace and Park and the Hotel itself 
breathe the romance of the 18th and 17th centuries. Above all the 
air was to make a new man of him. 

The young fellow felt a pang at leaving Paris, where Gray had se- 
cured him the friendship of Octave Uzanne and other literary celeb- 
rities. And the railway journey, short as it was, to and fro, from St. 
Germain, upset Beardsley as railway travelling always did. It cau- 
tioned care. 

Before May was out, Beardsley moved out to St. Germain-en-Laye, 
where he found pleasant rooms at the Pavilion Louis XIV, in the rue 
de Pointoise. The place was a joy to him. But the last day of May 
drove him to consult a famous physician about his tongue, which was 


243 


giving him trouble; the great man raised his hopes to radiant pitch 
by assuring him that he might get quite rid of his disease even yet— 
if he went to the mountains and avoided such places as Bournemouth 
and the South of France! He advised rigorous treatment whilst at St. 
Germain. However his drastic treatment of rising at cockcrow for a 
walk in the forest and early to bed seems to have upset Beardsley’s 
creaking body. The following day, the first of June, the bleeding of 
the lungs started again and made him wretched. The arrival of his 
sister, however, was a delight to him, and concerning this he wrote his 
delicious waggery that she showed only occasional touches of “an — 
accent which I am sure she has only acquired since she left America.” 
His health at once improved with his better spirits. 

Beardsley read at St. Germain one of the few books by a living gen- 
ius of which we have any record of his reading, Meredith’s Evan Har- 
rington; it was about the time that the Mercure published in French 
the Essay on Comedy which started widespread interest in the works of 
Meredith. : 

By mid-June Beardsley was greatly cheered; ‘everyone in the hotel 
notices how much I have improved in the last few days”; but his sit- 
ting out in the forest was near done. A cold snap shrivelled him, and 
lowered his vitality; a hot wave raised his hopes, only to be chilled 
again; and then sleep deserted him. On the 2nd of July he made a 
journey into Paris to get further medical advice; he had been advised 
to make for the sea and it had appealed to him. His hopes were raised 
_ by the doctor’s confidence in the cure by good climates, and Beardsley 
decided on Dieppe. Egypt was urged upon him, but probably the 
means forbade. 

Thus, scarce a month after he had gone to St. Germain in high 

244, 


ALI BABA IN THE WOOD 


hopes, Beardsley on the 6th of July was ordered to Dieppe, whence 
he wrote of his arrival on the 12th of July at the Hotel Sandwich in 
the rue Halle au Blé. He was so favoured with splendid weather that 
he was out and about again; and he was reading and writing. Fritz 
Thaulow’s family welcomed him back. He scarcely dares to boast of 
his improved health, it has seemed to bring ill-luck so often. But best 
of all blessings, he was now able to work. It was in this August that he 
met Vincent O’Sullivan, the young writer. Here he spent his twenty- 
fifth birthday. Before the month was half through he was fretting to 
be back in Paris for the winter. September came in wet and cold. He 
found this Hotel rather exposed to the wind, and so was taken to more 
sheltered lodgings in the Hotel des Estrangers in the rue d’Aguado, 
hoping that Dieppe might still know a gentle September. Though the 
weather remained wet and cold, he kept well; but caution pointed to 
Paris. His London doctor came over to Dieppe on holiday, cheered 
him vastly with hopes of a complete recovery if he took care of him- 
self, and advised Paris for the early winter. Beardsley, eager as he was 
for Paris, turned his back on Dieppe with a pang—he left many 
friends. However, late September saw him making for Paris with un- 
feigned joy, and settling in rooms at the Hotel Foyot in the rue Tour- 
non near the Luxembourg Gardens. 

His arrival in his beloved Paris found Beardsley suffering again 
from a chill that kept him to his room; but he was hopeful. The doc- 
tor considered him curable still; he might have not only several years 
of life before him “‘but perhaps even a long life.” But the scorching 
heat of the days of his arrival in Paris failed to shake him free of the 
chill. Still, the fine weather cheered him and he was able to be much 

247 


out of doors. Good food and turpentine baths aided; and he was— 
reading the Memoirs of Casanova! But he had grown cautious; found 
that seeing many people tired him; and begs for some “happy and 
inspiring book.” But as October ran out, the doctors began to shake 
solemn heads—all the talk was henceforth of the South of Franch. 
“Every fresh person one meets has fresh places to suggest & fresh ob- 
jections to the places we have already thought of. Yet I dare not linger 
late in Paris; but what a pity that I have to leave!” Biarritz was put 
aside on account of its Atlantic gales; Arcachon because pictures of 
it show it horribly ““Bournemouthy.” The Sisters of the Sacré Cceur 
sent him a bottle of water from Lourdes. ‘Yet all the same I get 
dreadfully nervous, & stupidly worried about little things.”’ However, 
the doctors sternly forbade winter in Paris. November came in chilly, 
with fogs; and Beardsley felt it badly. The first week of November 
saw his mother taking him off southwards to the sun, and settling in 
the rooms at the Hotel Cosmopolitain at Mentone which was to be his 
last place of flitting. | 

Yet Beardsley left Paris feeling “better and stronger than I have 
ever been since my school days’’; but the fogs that drove him forth 
made him write his last ominous message from the Paris that he loved 
so well: “If I don’t take a decided turn for the better now I shall go 
down hill rather quickly.” 

At Mentone Beardsley felt happy enough. He liked the picturesque 
place. Free from hemorrhage, cheered by the sunshine, he rallied 
again and was rid of all pains in his lungs, was sleeping well, and eat- 
ing well; was out almost all day; and people noticed the improvement 
in him, to his great glee. And he was busying himself with illustra- 
tions for Ben Jonson’s Volpone, and was keenly interested in a new 


248 


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venture by Smithers who proposed a successor to The Savoy which he 
wished to call The Peacock. 

The mountain and the sea suited Beardsley. “I am much happier 
and more peaceful,” but “the mistral has not blown yet.” 

So, in this November of 1897 Beardsley wrought for the Cover of 
Volpone one of the most wonderful decorative designs that ever 
brought splendour of gold on vellum to the cover of any mortal’s book. 
He also made a pen drawing for the Cover of a prospectus for Volpone, 
which was after his death published in the book as a Frontispiece, for 
which it was in no way intended and is quite unfitted, and concerning 
which he gave most explicit instructions that it should not appear in 
the book at all as he was done with the technique of it and had devel- 
oped and created a new style for the book wholly unlike it. All the 
same, it might have been used without hurt to the other designs, or so 
it seems to me, as a Title Page, since Volpone is lettered on a label 
upon it. Nevertheless Beardsley never intended nor desired nor would 
have permitted that it should appear in the body of the book at all; 
for it is, as he points out, quite out of keeping with the whole style of 
the decorations. It was only to be employed as an attraction on the 
Prospectus. But in this Prospectus Cover for Volpone his hand’s skill 
reveals no slightest hesitation nor weakness from his body’s sorry 
state—its lines are firmly drawn, almost to mechanical severity. And 
all the marvellous suggestion of material surfaces are there, the white 
robe of the bewigged figure who stands with hands raised palm to 
palm suppliant-wise—the dark polished wood of the gilt doorway— 
the fabric of the curtains—the glitter of precious metals and gems. 

In a letter to “dear Leonardo” of this time he sent a “‘complete 

251 


2 


list of drawings for the Volpone,” suggested its being made a com- 
panion volume to The Rape of the Lock, and asked Smithers to an- 
nounce it in The Atheneum. Besides the now famous and beautiful 
Cover, he planned 24 subjects, as Smithers states in his dedication of 
Volpone to Beardsley’s mother, though the fine initials which he did 
execute are, strangely enough, not even mentioned in that list. He re- 
veals that the frontispiece is to be, like the design of the prospectus, 
Volpone and his treasure, but that is to be in line and wash—obvi- 
ously in the style of The Lady and the Monkey—yet strangely enough, 
the remaining 23 subjects he distinctly puts down as being in “line”! 
And it is in this letter that he promises “a line drawing for a Pros- 
pectus in a few days,” stating especially that it will be a less elaborate 
and line version of the Frontispiece—and that it is not to appear in — 
the book. We have the line drawing for the Prospectus—and we can 
only guess what a fine thing would have been this same design treated 
in the manner of The Lady and the Monkey or the Initials. That, in 
this list, 23 of the 24 designs were to be in line is a little baffling in 
face of the fact that the Initials were in the new method, line with 
pencil employed like a wash, and that Beardsley himself definitely 
states, as we shall see in a letter written on the 19th of this month, 
that the drawings are a complete departure in method from anything 
he had yet done, which the Initials certainly were. 

On the 8th of December, Beardsley wrote to “friend Smithers,” 
sending the Cover Design for Volpone and the Design for the Pros- 
pectus of Volpone, begging for proofs, especially of the Design for 
the Prospectus, ‘“‘on various papers at once.”’ Smithers sent the proofs 
of the two blocks with a present of some volumes of Racine for 
Beardsley’s Christmas cheer. The beautiful Miniature edition of The 

252 


Rape of the Lock, with Beardsley’s special Cover-design in gold on 
scarlet, had just been published—the ‘‘little Rapelets”’ as Beardsley 
called them. 

However, these 24 designs for the Volpone were never to be. But 
we know something about them from a letter to Smithers, written on 
the 19th of December, which he begins with reference to the new mag- 
azine of The Peacock projected by Smithers, of which more later. 
Whilst delighted with the idea of editing The Peacock, Beardsley ex- 
presses fear lest the business and turmoil of the new venture may put 
the Volpone into second place, and he begs that it shall not be so, that 
there shall be no delay in its production. He evidently sent the Initials 
with this letter, for he underlines that Volpone is to be an important 
book, as Smithers can judge from the drawings that Beardsley is now 
sending him—indeed the Initials were, alas! all that he was ever des- 
tined to complete—the 24 illustrations were not to be. That these 
Initials were the designs sent is further made clear by the remark that 
the new work is a complete, “‘a marked departure as illustrative and 
decorative work from any other arty book published for many years.” 
He pronounces in the most unmistakable terms that he has left behind 
him definitely all his former methods. He promises the drawings to be 
printed in the text by the first week in January, and that they shall be 
“good work, the best I have ever done.” 

On the morrow of Christmas, Beardsley was writing to Smithers, 
urging on the production of the Prospectus for Volpone; and it is in- 
teresting to find in this Yuletide letter that the fine drawing in line and 
wash, in his aquatint style, of The Lady and the Monkey, was origi- 
nally intended for the Volpone and not for the set of the Mademoiselle 
de Maupin in which it eventually appeared; but was cast out of the 

253 


Volpone by Beardsley as “‘it will be quite out of keeping with the rest 
of the initials.” So that the style of the Initials was clearly the method 
he had intended to employ for his illustrations. 

What his remarkable creative fancy and dexterity of hand designed 
for the illustrations to Volpone only The Lady and the Monkey and the 
Initials can hint to us—he was never to create them. 

The sunshine and the warmth, the picturesque surroundings of the 
place, the mountains and the sea, brought back hope to the plagued 
fellow; and again he clambered out of the grave. Languor and depres- 
sion left him. He was on the edge of Yuletide and had known no cold 
or chill; indeed his only “grievance is mosquitoes.”’ He would weigh 
himself anxiously, fearful of a set-back at every turn. 


Now, a fantastically tragic fact of Beardsley’s strange career—a fact 
that Max Beerbohm alone of all those who have written upon Beardsley 
has noticed—was the very brief period of the public interest in him. 
Beardsley arose to a universal fame at a bound—with The Yellow 
Book; he fell from the vogue with as giddy a suddenness. With the 
Jast number of The Savoy he had vanished from the public eye almost 
as though he had never been. The Press no longer recorded his do- 
ings; and his failure to keep the public interest with The Savoy, and 
all its superb achievement, left but a small literary and artistic coterie 
in London sufficiently interested in his doings to care or enquire 
whether he were alive or dead or sick or sorry, or even as to what new 
books he was producing. The Book of Fifty Drawings seemed to have 
written Finis to his career. Nobody realised this, nor had better cause 
to realise it, than Leonard Smithers. It had been intended to continue 
The Savoy in more expensive form as a half-yearly volume; but 


254 


INITIAL FOR ‘‘VOLPONE”’ 


Smithers found that it was hopeless as a financial venture—it had all 
ended in smoke. Smithers was nevertheless determined to fan the pub- 
lic homage into life again with a new magazine the moment he thought 
it possible. And the significance of the now very rare “newspaper cut- 
ting” had not been lost upon Beardsley himself. So it had come about 
that Smithers had planned the new magazine, to be called The Pea- 
cock, to appear in the April of 1898, to take the place of The Savoy; 
and had keenly interested Beardsley in the venture. For once Beards- 
ley’s flair for a good title failed him, and he would have changed the 
name of The Peacock to Books and Pictures, which sounded common- 
place enough to make The Peacock appear quite good when otherwise 
it seemed somewhat pointless. 

Beardsley’s letter of the 19th of December to Smithers was clearly 
in reply to the urging of Smithers that Beardsley should be the edtior 
of his new magazine The Peacock and should design the cover and 
whatever else was desired by Smithers. But Beardsley makes one un- 
swerving condition, and but one—that “‘it is quite agreed that Oscar 
Wilde contributes nothing to the magazine, anonymously, pseudo- 
nymously or otherwise.’’ The underlining is Beardsley’s. Beardsley’s 
detestation of Wilde, and of all for which Wilde stood in the public 
eye, is the more pronounced seeing that both men had entered the 
Church of Rome with much publicity. Beardsley would not have 
Wilde in any association with him at any price. . . . Before Beards- 
ley leaves the subject of The Peacock he undertakes to design “a 
resplendent peacock in black and white” and reminds Smithers that 
he has “already some fine wash drawings” of his from which he 
can choose designs for the first number of the magazine. So that we at 
least know that this first number of The Peacock was to have had a 

207 


resplendent peacock in black and white for its cover, and that it was 
to have been adorned with the superb decorations for Mademoiselle de 
Maupin, the supreme artistic achievement of Beardsley’s resplendent 
skill. He outstripped in beauty of handling even his already exquisite 
craftsmanship: and it is the most tragic part of his tragedy of life that 
he was to die before he had given the world the further fulfilment 
of his wondrous artistry—leaving us wondering as to what further 
heights he might have scaled. 

Beardsley knew full well that these drawings in line and wash, in 
his ‘‘aquatint”’ style, were his supreme achievement. | 

We know from a letter from Beardsley in this month that Smithers 
was still at his little office at No. 4, in the Royal Arcade, off Bond 
Street, whence Smithers sent me a coloured engraving of the Made- 
moiselle de Maupin, at Beardsley’s request, which had been beauti- 
fully reproduced in a very limited edition. Though Beardsley himself 
realised his weakness in oil painting, he would have made a mark in 
watercolours, employed with line, like coloured engravings. 

But the gods had willed that it should not be. 

Beardsley always had the astuteness to give great pains and care to 
the planning of his prospectuses—he watched over them with fatherly 
anxiety and solicitude. But what is less known is the very serious part 
he played on the literary editor’s side of the magazine of which he was 
art-editor. And in his advice to Smithers concerning the new venture 
of The Peacock, he has left to us not only the astute pre-vision upon 
which he insisted to Smithers, but he reveals his own tastes and ideals 
in very clear terms. The magazine, as he wisely warns Smithers, 
should not be produced “‘unless you have piles of stuff up your edito- 
rial sleeves.” And he proceeded to lay down with trenchant emphasis 

258 


his ideals for the conduct of a magazine and, incidently, his opinions 
of the art and literature of the day, revealing a shrewd contempt for 
the pushful mediocrities who had elbowed their way into the columns 
of The Yellow Book and even The Savoy. “The thing,”’ he writes, 
‘“‘must be edited with a savage strictness, and very definite ideas about 
everything get aired in it. Let us give birth to no more little backbone- 
less babies. A little well-directed talent is in a periodical infinitely 
more effective than any amount of sporadic and desultory genius (es- 
pecially when there is no genius to be got).” Beardsley gives in more 
detail his mature attitude towards literature: ‘“‘On the literary side, 
impressionistic criticism and poetry and cheap short-storyness should 
be gone for. I think the critical element should be paramount. Let 
verse be printed very sparingly. . . . I should advise you to let 
Gilbert Burgess do occasional things for us. Try to get together a staff. 
Oh for a Jeffreys or a Gibbon, or anybody with something to say.” 
. . . And then we get in definite terms his sympathies and antipa- 
ithies in art—“‘On the art side, I suggest that it should attack un- 
- tiringly and unflinchingly the Burne-Jones and Morrisian medizval 
business, and set up a wholesome 17th and 18th century standard of 
what picture making should be.” 

There we have Beardsley’s whole range and also, be it confessed, 
his limitations. To the 18th century he owed all; and on the edge of 
eternity, unreservedly, frankly, and honourably, he made the solemn 
confession of his artistic faith. 


259 


X 
THE END 
1898 


YET the cruelty of Fate but more grimly pursued the stricken man 
with relentless step. December went out in “a pitiless drench of rain.” 
It kept Beardsley indoors. A week of it gave place to the sunshine 
again, and his hopes were reborn. 

So the Yuletide of 1897 came and went; and the New Year broke, 
with Beardsley dreaming restless dreams of further conquests. 

In the early days of the New Year, the dying man’s hopes were 
raised by the sight of “a famous Egyptologist who looks like a corpse, 
has looked like one for fourteen years, who is much worse than I am, 
& yet lives on and does things. My spirits have gone up immensely 
since I have known him.” . . . But the middle of the month saw the 
cold north-east wind come acne on Mentone, and it blew the flickering 
candle of Beardsley’s life to its guttering. After the 25th of January 
he never again left his room. February sealed his fate. He took to his 
bed, from which he arose but fitfully, yet at least he was granted the 
inestimable boon of being able to read. The Egyptologist also took to 
his bed—a bad omen for Beardsley. By the end of February the poor 
plagued fellow had lost heart—he felt the grave deepening and could 
not summon the will any further to clamber out of it. 

The sands in the hour-glass of Pierrot were running low. It was 
soon a fearful effort to use his beloved pen. Anxious to complete his 
designs and decorations for the Volpone, and remembering the push- 

260 


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ing forward of the Prospectus that he had urged on the publisher, he 
had fallen back on the pencil—as the elaborately drawn Initial let- 
ters show—for each of the scenes in Volpone, employing pencil with 
the consummate tact and beauty of craftsmanship that had marked 
his pen line and his aquatintesques in line and wash. Whatever 
dreams he had of full-paged illustrations in line and wash had now 
to be abandoned. Just as in his Great Period of The Savoy he had 
come nearer to nature and had discovered the grass on the fields and 
flowers in the woods to be as decorative under the wide heavens as they 
were when cut in glasses “‘at Goodyears”’ in the Royal Arcade; just as 
he had found that fabrics, gossamer or silk or brocade, were as deco- 
rative as were flat black masses; just as he found intensely musical _ 
increase in the orchestration of his line as he admitted nature into his 
imagination; so now he came still nearer to nature with the pencil, 
and his Satyr as a terminal god illumined by the volume of atmosphere 
and lit by the haunting twilight, like his Greek column against the 
sky, took on quite as decorative a form as any flatness of black or 
white in his Japanesque or Greek Vase-painting phases. But as his 
skilled fingers designed the new utterance to his eager spirit, the 
fragile body failed him—at last the unresponsive pencil fell from his 
bloodless fingers—his work was done. 

As the young fellow lay a-dying on the 7th of March, nine days be- 
fore he died he scribbled with failing fingers that last appeal from 
the Hotel Cosmopolitain at Mentone to his friend the publisher Leon- 
ard Smithers that he himself had put beyond that strange man’s power 
to fulfil—even had he had the will—for “the written word remains,” 
and, printed, is scattered to the four winds of heaven: 


263 


Jesus is our Lord & Judge 


Dear Friend, I implore you to destroy all copies of Lysistrata & bad 
drawings. Show this to Pollitt and conjure him to do same. By all that is 
holy—all obscene drawings. 

Aubrey Beardsley. 
In my death agony. 


But this blotting out was now beyond any man’s doing. The bitter re- 
pentance of the dying Beardsley conforms but ill with the canting 
theories of such apologists as hold that Beardsley was a satirist lashing 
the vices of his age. Beardsley had no such delusions, made no such 
claims, was guiltless of any such self-righteousness. He faced the stern 
facts of his own committing; and almost with the last words he wrote 
he condemned the acts of his hands that had sullied a marvellous 
achievement—and he did so without stooping to any attempt at pal- 
liation or excuse. His dying eyes gazed unflinchingly at the truth— 
and the truth was very naked. The jackals who had egged him on to 
base ends and had sniggered at his obscenities, when his genius might 
have been soaring in the empyrean, could bring him scant comfort as 
he looked back upon the untidy patches of his wayfaring; nor were 
they the likely ones to fulfil his agonised last wishes—indeed, almost 
before his poor racked body was cold, they were about to exploit not 
only the things he desired to be undone, but they were raking to- 
gether for their own profit the earlier crude designs that they knew 
full well Beardsley had striven his life long to keep from publication 
owing to their wretched mediocrity of craftsmanship. 

On the sixteenth day of the March of 1898, at twenty-five years 
and seven months, his mother and his sister by his side, the racked 
body was stilled, and the soul of Aubrey Beardsley passed into eternity. 

264, 


The agonised mother who had been his devoted companion and guar- 
dian throughout this long twelvemonth of flitting flight from death, 
together with his beloved sister Mabel Beardsley, were with him to 
the end. They were present at the Cathedral Mass; and “‘there was 
music.” So the body of Aubrey Beardsley was borne along the road 
that winds from the Cathedral to the burial place that “seemed like 
the way of the Cross—it was long and steep and we walked.” They 
laid him to rest in a grave on the edge of the hill hewn out of the rock, 
a sepulchre with an arched opening and a stone closing it, so that they 
who took their last walk beside him “thought of the sepulchre of The 
Lord.” 
Hail and Farewell! 


AVE ATQVE VALE 


265 


bate 1 : : WP) ee 
f Ape See Oe y m : y 4 
A KEY 
TO THE DATES OF WORKS 
BY AUBREY BEARDSLEY 
ACCORDING TO THE STYLE OF HIS SIGNATURE 

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OT ae a a ae Barve pee. mae Fok a, ee A hana 
’ Le SATA Rh | ee wee ig ; ee ia 


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ad 
a) 


for the last time. 


A KEY TO THE DATES OF WORKS BY AUBREY BEARDSLEY 
ACCORDING TO THE STYLE OF HIS SIGNATURE 


PUERILIA 
Mid-1888 he comes to town 


JUVENILIA 
Mid-1889 to Mid-1891, blank of achievement 


FORMATIVE PERIOD—BURNE-JONESESQUES 
Mid-1891 to Mid-1892 
During these three periods, up to Mid-1892, Beardsley signs with three 
initials A. V. B. 


MEDLEVALISM AND THE HAIRY-LINE JAPANESQUES 
The Morte d’ Arthur and Bon Mots 
Mid-1892 to Mid-1893. Begins the “Japanesque mark”—the stunted 


mark, 
+f 


In the Spring of 1893, with the coming of “The Studio,” and the ending 
of this period, Beardsley cuts the V out of his initials and out of his signa- 
ture. He now signs A. B. or A. BEARDSLEY or AUBREY B. in ill-shaped 


“rustic” capitals, when he does not employ the “Japanesque mark,” even 


sometimes when he does employ it. 


“SALOME” 
Mid-1893 to the New Year 1894. The “Japanesque mark’ becomes 


_ longer, more slender, and more graceful. 


“THE YELLOW BOOK” OR GREEK VASE PERIOD 
This ran from the New Year 1894 to Mid-1895; and in the middle of this 
Yellow Book period, that is, in Mid-1894, he signs the “Japanesque mark” 


269 


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THE GREAT PERIOD 
“The Savoy” and II. “The Aquatintesiieam 
ae 1895 to Yuletide 1896 1897 7 
From Mid-1895 Beardsley signs in plain block capitals, eke u 
end—the only difference being that in the last phase of the Be - 


eh now ieualiy in a corner of jis design, ie in or ve Teithon a cmall 7 


label. 


a 
Bon 


270 


“AUBREY BEARDSLEY” 
HAS BEEN DESIGNED 
BY ROBERT S. JOSEPHY 
: p AND PRINTED UNDER HIS 
SUPERVISION BY THE 
VAIL-BALLOU PRESS 
BINGHAMTON 
NEW YORK 


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